An owl's hoot is one of the few bird calls that people have turned into a word, and Dave Bonta's poem starts by doing exactly that. "A who who to which / we can give no answer": the call becomes a question, and the question lands on us. Nothing tells us who is asking or what is being asked, and that vagueness is the point. The owl's "who" points at nobody in particular. Who is responsible? Who is missing? Who will speak up? The poem's collective "we" admits it has nothing to say back.
The second stanza is blunt. "The snappish owl / is dead and buried." The title names a spotted owl, a bird many readers associate with conservation arguments, though the poem never describes it or says how it died. "Snappish" is the strangest word here. It means irritable, quick to bite, and it makes the bird sound like a cranky neighbour. That is the kind of small, belittling description that makes something easier to dismiss. The poem doesn't say whose word it is, the speaker's or that of people glad to see the owl go, and that uncertainty is unsettling. "Dead and buried" also does double duty. It is what we say about a closed argument as well as a dead animal, so the phrase hovers between a literal death and a settled matter. The lack of a full stop at the end means the matter doesn't quite feel settled.
The final stanza is where the poem turns. "We ward off witches and spirits / with the noise of profit." Owls have long been tied to omens and the supernatural in folklore, so there is an irony in the owl's death being followed by talk of spirits. The most natural reading is that the thing being warded off is the owl's ghost, the unanswered "who who" that keeps echoing. The noise is the defence against it. Judging by the imagery, "noise of profit" suggests machinery and commerce, though the poem keeps it abstract, which lets it stand for anything loud enough to cover a quiet question. The owl's sound asks something, and the sound of profit exists to stop us hearing it.
The poem's sounds support this. The first stanza is full of *wh* sounds: "who," "who," "which." The third picks them up in "ward," "witches" and "with." "Which" and "witches" are almost the same sound, so the poem seems to hint that the question we can't answer has been swapped for superstition. Instead of facing "who?", we reach for charms, and the charm is money.
The form is very plain. There are three two-line stanzas, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. The missing question mark after the "who who" matters. The question has no punctuation to contain it, so it hangs there unanswerable. The lines also grow as the poem goes on. The opening line is five syllables, all single-beat words that stumble like a hoot. The second stanza is shorter and flatter, with lines of four and five syllables, as if the death has been reported in a few words. Then the last stanza swells to eight syllables in "we ward off witches and spirits." Human activity crowds in and fills the space the owl left, which is the poem's argument shown in its shape.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It could have been a straightforward lament for a vanishing species. Instead it makes a joke of sorts (the pun on who/which/witches, the faintly comic "snappish") and then turns that wit against us. The "we" in "we can give no answer" and "we ward off" includes the reader, so nobody gets to stand outside the blame. The poem also ends on the word "profit," the noise that gets the last word, while the owl's question is left without an answer.