Every town seems to have one: the dog who treats the road as personal property and every passing car as an insult. In "Our Traffic Cop," John B. Colwell takes that familiar nuisance and promotes him to public servant. The speaker watches a street dog chasing cars near the West Side Park and decides he is not misbehaving at all but policing, a "self appointed, canine cop" working the "dog-town 'Go' and 'Stop.'" The comedy comes first, but a second idea sits underneath it: the speaker envies the dog, because the dog does what the speaker cannot.
The poem falls into two halves. The first twelve lines describe; the second turn to confession. In the opening section the speaker is amused and admiring. The dog's methods are listed like items on a police report — "one mean look," "bare teeth, a growl, or a bitten tire" — and the escalation is funny because it is so orderly. A glare, then a growl, then the tire. The phrase "by every dog known ruse" borrows the language of detective stories, while "mind their Ps and Qs" is a schoolroom phrase, as if drivers were unruly pupils and the dog a strict teacher. Colwell keeps mixing registers like this, authority vocabulary applied to a mutt, and the mismatch is where much of the humor lives.
The second half is where the poem reveals what it cares about. "Ah me, for just one happy day, / I'd love to be this dog, this stray!" The sigh is comic, but the grievance that follows reads as real: drivers "steal my rights, with a laugh and wink." That image is sharper than anything in the first section. The offending drivers are not merely careless; they are smug. The dog can answer them with teeth, while the human speaker, bound by manners and law, can only watch. The wish to "growl, and bark, bare teeth, and fight" is a fantasy about dropping social restraint, and a fairly relatable one for anyone who has stood at a crosswalk while a car rolled through.
The sound of the poem supports its tone. Most of it runs in tidy rhyming couplets (town/down, park/bark, cop/stop, by/eye), and the lines move in a quick, bouncy rhythm that suits light verse. The couplets feel like a trotting dog: regular, a little repetitive, always pressing forward. Colwell also leans on punctuation for personality. The doubled exclamation marks after "ire!!" and the quotation marks around "Hell bent" and "no can do" give the voice an informal, chatty quality, like a neighbor telling the story over a fence. The closing quatrain breaks the pattern, shortening into four clipped lines, and the shift works like a dog stopping short at the end of its leash. The final line, "I 'no can do,'" deliberately mangles grammar, a bit of pidgin humor that lets the speaker admit defeat with a shrug.
The word "stray" deserves attention. A stray has no owner, no license, no rules, and that freedom is exactly what the speaker covets. Likewise "ire" and "wise" sit side by side in the same line, "this wise dog is full of ire," suggesting that anger can be a kind of intelligence, that the dog's fury is principled rather than random. The poem quietly argues that some outrage is justified, and that politeness is not always a virtue when someone is driving too fast past a park.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets out of a small, ordinary scene. It is not ambitious in the grand sense, and it does not pretend to be. Its achievement is tone: affectionate toward the dog, gently mocking toward the speaker's own frustration, and sharp enough about reckless drivers to land a real point. It reminds us that light verse can still carry a grievance, and that sometimes the funniest way to say "slow down" is to let a stray dog say it for you.