The joke comes first, and the poem spends five lines quietly taking it back. "Superb owl, bad call" puns on the Super Bowl, and "bad call" can mean a referee's blunder or the cry of a bird. Beneath that title there is no wordplay at all. Someone walks through a churchyard, hears an owl, and chooses not to look. The poem is about a small act of restraint in the presence of death, and its central idea seems to be that some things are better met by listening than by staring.
The first stanza is built from careful omissions. The word "dead" never appears, and neither do "grave" or "death." There are only "people" who "have been buried," in a passive construction where no one does the burying. Then comes the odd, tender detail: "in good clothes." The phrase suggests Sunday best, the outfit chosen for a funeral, and now it lies under the grass, still dressed for an occasion. A churchyard brings with it the idea of something to come, so the clothes can be read as hopeful, or as faintly absurd, or both. The line break matters here. "In good clothes" is stranded on its own, only three syllables after two longer lines, and it lands like a small shock, an image that is hard to unsee.
The syntax adds to the effect. The whole poem is a single unpunctuated sentence, and the only capital letter is the pronoun "I." The opening "walking" hangs without a subject for three lines. The speaker does not enter the grammar until line four, at the moment he hears the owl. Until then he is only a motion through a place, and the stanza break works like a pause on the path.
In the second stanza, "again" and "the owl" (not "an owl") suggest a bird the speaker already knows, one that has called before. Many folk traditions treat an owl's cry as an omen of death, and the title's "bad call" winks at that. Yet the poem never says the speaker is afraid. "And do not look" is flat and present-tense, and it can be read in several ways. It could be superstition, courtesy to a place that deserves hush, or a refusal to turn a mystery into a sighting. The poem leaves the choice open. It also costs the speaker little, since owls are heard far more often than seen. The bird stays a voice in the dark, and in a churchyard that voice sits comfortably beside the buried, who are also present and unseen.
The sound of the poem is plain. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short lines that run roughly six, seven, three, six and four syllables, so each stanza tapers. Both end on blunt phrases of one-syllable words, "in good clothes" and "do not look." The short vowels in "good" and "look" make a faint echo across the stanza break. It links the buried, who are dressed with such care, to the gesture of looking away. The poem is quiet in just the way the walker is.
What makes it worth reading is the balance it strikes. The title is wry and the body is grave, and neither cancels the other. The joke reads like the nervous humour of someone passing a graveyard, but the poem does not stay in that mood. By the end it has moved to something steadier, an acceptance that there are things you hear and let be. The most important events are left out. Nothing happens except a walk, a sound, and a decision not to turn the head. The poem ends on a verb of withheld action, so the reader is left, like the speaker, simply walking on, with the owl behind and the well-dressed dead around.