Where Good Night and Shut Up Sound the Same

The crows settling into the trees

make a deafening racket as if

outraged by the sun going down

by the damp chilly night coming on

though with reason to fret even so

further shouting more carrying on

endless others to share the complaint

what about me they cry as if 

sent to bed hungry when all it is

slim pickings a sorry bellyful of

stale moldy bread scattered French fries

with some stupid dipping sauce

upsetting their delicate stomach

stuffed with crickets baby birds maggots

as they natter and groan on and on

getting it all off their chest

is this all we get where’s the sun gone

spiral down in a deepening gloom

where good night and shut up sound the same

where leaning in holding tight they fall silent

as one then the next dozes off

—Paul Hunter

---

For the past twenty-one years Paul Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works, currently including twenty-six books and over sixty broadsides. His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in the New York Times, and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. Other farming poems collections followed from Silverfish Review Press: Ripening, 2007, Come the Harvest, 2008, and Stubble Field, 2012. He has been a featured poet on The News Hour, and has a prose book on small-scale, sustainable farming, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, published by the Small Farmer’s Journal, 2010.

Published in Raven Chronicles Laugh. Laugh? Laugh!, Vol. 21, 2015.