The first line of Dave Bonta's poem sounds like a small, pleased discovery: "So those are magpies!" The speaker seems to be meeting these birds properly for the first time, and the graveyard scene that follows keeps tilting between sharp observation and superstition, and between comedy and grief. The title supplies the frame. It borrows the old counting rhyme in which the number of magpies you spot forecasts your luck, and by the final line that rhyme has been asked to do something it can't.
Formally, the poem is a single unbroken block of short lines with no end rhyme and no steady beat. That suits its voice, which is conversational and a little dry, like someone murmuring to himself among the headstones. The line breaks carry much of the wit. "They hover over" stops mid-phrase, so the birds hang in the air for a moment before "the graves" arrives. "In their black- / &-white way" splits a hyphenated word across the break, and the casual ampersand makes the birds look almost like print on a page. Because the sentences are short and declarative, the odd remarks land with a deadpan force.
The imagery is quietly strange. The magpies hover "like eyebrows / or second thoughts," a comparison that works twice. Their curved shapes do resemble raised brows, which gives them a look of mild, skeptical judgment. "Second thoughts" turns the graveyard into a place of hesitation and regret, as if the birds were the living's doubts made visible. Then comes a piece of comic logic: when the speaker raises the camera, the birds fly off, "proof / they're not spirits / but among the quick." The old phrase "the quick and the dead" is hiding in "quick," and the idea that a ghost wouldn't mind being photographed is both funny and faintly unsettling. It suggests the speaker had half wondered.
The most startling line is the claim of "our shared mission: / to rob the dead." The magpies' reputation for thieving has been planted by "acquisitive" and "shiny," and now the speaker enlists himself among the thieves. The poem never says what is being stolen. The camera is one clue, and the poem itself may be another. Anyone who walks among graves and carries away images, words, or a little consolation has taken something. That reading is an inference, but the line invites it by making the human visitor as guilty as the bird.
The setting gets its own double-take. The birds' chatter is "a refuge / from this refuge," so even the cemetery, a place of peace, needs escaping. Its noise is mechanical, since "even the weed / eater keens." A keen is a traditional wail of mourning, and here the job of lamenting has gone to a garden machine. The humor never quite cancels the sadness. It shows how grief can be reduced to background noise.
Then the tone shifts. Among their own kind, the magpies are "blessed with sufficient wit / to comprehend loss," and "said to indulge / in rituals of grief." The hearsay phrasing ("said to") keeps the speaker at a skeptical distance, and "indulge" is gently ironic. Still, the birds are credited with understanding that the thieving human may be struggling to reach.
The ending is the poem's quiet masterstroke: "I try counting them: / one, one, one." The word "try" admits that the speaker wants an omen. The count refuses to add up. Under the rhyme, a lone magpie means sorrow, so three single birds could mean sorrow three times over, or the speaker may be unable to get the birds to pair off. The line is three identical monosyllables, which sounds like a bell tolling. It is also hard not to hear the speaker's own solitude in it, though that is a reading, not a fact the poem states.
The poem matters because it approaches grief sideways, through jokes, birdwatching, and a worn scrap of folklore, and then lets the sadness arrive without comment. The old rhyme promised joy as the reward for pairs, and the poem withholds it.