A walk in the woods becomes a small ambush. The speaker hears yelping in the distance and takes it for coyotes, only to realise, as the phrase "at first" admits, that the sounds come from children. The title, "Primary school," has already set up an expectation of classrooms and corridors, so the scene lands as a surprise. Here the children are outdoors and loud enough to be mistaken for wild animals. The poem seems to ask what a first education actually is, and "primary" can mean "first" or "fundamental" as well as "for young children." That reading is an inference from the title, but it fits what follows, since the woods, not a building, are where the poem's lessons happen.
The first stanza is built with care. A long middle line, "at first I mistake their distant yelps," sits between two very short ones, "Children in the woods:" and "for coyotes." The last line is only three syllables, so the mistake is delivered abruptly, almost like a punchline. "Yelps" is also a good word: sharp, onomatopoeic, an animal sound. The children are wild before they are anything else, and the speaker, listening from a distance, is a little afraid of that wildness.
The second stanza turns inward with the poem's only question: "When did I stop climbing trees?" Nobody answers it. The next sentence, "Views are best when seasoned / with a little terror," reads like a proverb, but the cooking metaphor makes it fresh. Fear becomes a spice that gives a view its flavour. The line break matters here, because "seasoned" hangs at the end of a line and the word "terror" arrives a beat late. "A little" is a funny, honest piece of understatement. The speaker is not after real danger, just enough to make the height worth it. The first stanza has quietly prepared this idea, since the false alarm over the coyotes was itself a small, harmless jolt of the same feeling. The adult has to be surprised into it, while the children produce it without trying.
Then comes the cicada. Cicada nymphs climb up trunks to shed their old skins, so this image connects back to the tree-climbing of the second stanza. The speaker finds one "stuck half-way out / of its former self." The hyphen in "half-way" and the line break after "out" make the sentence stall, as if the poem itself were caught in mid-escape. The phrase "former self" does double duty. It describes the insect's empty shell, but it also names what the speaker has been asking about, the child who used to climb. The dead cicada can be read as a failed transformation, or as a picture of the speaker, who is no longer the climber and not quite anything else yet. The poem offers no explanation and ends on the image. "Once" at the start of the stanza gives it the feel of a memory, though the poem doesn't say when the discovery happened.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is three tercets of plain speech, which suits its tone of quiet self-questioning. The sound still holds together in small ways. The hard c/k sounds of "coyotes," "climbing" and "cicada" run through the three stanzas like a thread, and each stanza has its own "I" doing something different: mistaking, asking, finding. The stanzas move from hearing to wondering to seeing. Compact and image-led, the poem has something of the haiku about it, though it does not follow a syllable count.
What makes it worth reading is its restraint. Poems about lost childhood often slide into sentimentality, but this one never says it misses anything. It gives us a sound that was misheard, a question left hanging, and a dead insect, and trusts us to feel the connection. The children are alive and noisy, and the cicada is stuck half in and half out of its old skin. The speaker stands between them, still able to feel a little terror, and the poem leaves open whether he will climb again.