Boondocks is a word for anywhere far from the action, and the title tells us where to stand: at the edge, looking at the centre with some suspicion. The first two lines, "get the press out of the city / and they do not love us", are deliberately slippery. With no punctuation, we can't tell who "they" are or who "us" includes. Maybe the press, once removed from its urban comfort, finds itself unloved in the country. Maybe the people out there don't love the city, or the city's reporters, or whoever speaks for the city. The poem never settles it, and that uncertainty is the point. Hostility is stated flatly, as a fact, and left unexplained.
Then the poem turns on a question that sounds almost childlike: "who is looking / after the moon". The line break matters. "Who is looking" can stand as a complete thought, a question about who is watching and who is paying attention. Only when we reach "after the moon" does the phrase shift to its other meaning, who is taking care of it, who is its keeper. The moon becomes something that needs minding, a shared possession no one has been put in charge of. It also prepares the way for the night that closes the poem.
The third stanza answers by pointing at people rather than explaining. "I see patient laboring men / housekeepers / poor wives and strangers." Here the speaker steps in for the first time, and the verb is simply "see". The catalogue of the overlooked is an old poetic gesture, and the lineation lets it do quiet work. The first line is long and full, with "patient" and "laboring" carrying the weight of steady, unrewarded effort. The next is a single word, "housekeepers", which looks small on the page, as such work often is in life. The last widens to "poor wives and strangers", and the inclusion of "strangers" matters. These are not only the speaker's neighbours but anyone unknown and unrecorded. The press that was shipped out of the city in the opening lines never writes about these people, and the speaker does.
The ending is the most striking move. "against all tyranny / having one good night" sets an enormous word beside a tiny ambition. Tyranny is "all" of it, total, and the answer to it is not revolt or a manifesto but a single good night. The sentence is grammatically loose. We cannot say whether the people are having the night in defiance of tyranny, or whether having it is itself the resistance. Either way, the poem suggests that ordinary pleasure and rest, taken in spite of power, are a form of opposition. The night links back to the moon, so the keepers of the moon may be these same people, who own the dark hours in a way no city editor does.
Formally the poem is bare. It has no rhyme, no punctuation, and almost no capital letters, apart from the lone "I". The stanzas run two lines, two lines, three, then two, and the short, uneven units feel less like a planned structure than like remarks dropped into a silence. The sound is soft and rounded. Words like "moon", "love", "looking" and "laboring" repeat gentle l and m sounds, and this gives the political edge of the poem an unexpectedly tender voice. The fragmentary syntax also makes the poem feel gathered rather than composed, as if its lines were overheard or picked out of a longer stream. That is an impression from the text only, but it suits a poem about listening to those who are usually left out.
What makes "Boondocks" worth reading is its economy and its refusal to shout. In under thirty words it sets distrust, attention, and endurance side by side, and it makes attention itself the moral act: to look after something, you first have to look. The poem's hope is small enough to be believable, and that is why it stays in the mind.