Most poems about school are set in a classroom. Dave Bonta's "Secondary school" barely goes near one. In three short stanzas it describes the speaker's real education, which happened elsewhere, and then the faint, anxious shadow of the official one. The title is quietly mischievous. "Secondary" can mean the stage of schooling after primary, but the poem also seems to treat school as secondary in importance, a place that comes second to the woodstove.
The first stanza sets up that contrast through a swap: "a woodstove / instead of a TV." A television gathers a family in front of a glowing screen, and a woodstove does the same with fire. What the speaker grew up with is a rival form of entertainment, and it taught him things. The next sentence makes this explicit with a joke that is also a real claim: "I know all / the theme songs of oak." Theme songs belong to TV shows, the tunes you can hum after a hundred viewings. Applying the phrase to oak turns the tree into a long-running series with its own recognisable music. Judging by the imagery, that music could be wind in the leaves, creaking branches, or even the crackle of oak burning in the stove. The woodstove and the tree may be one source of knowledge, listened to in two forms. The line break after "all" lets the boast stand for a beat before the line narrows to something specific and oddly modest.
The second stanza changes direction. "If I could unlearn / the names of the birds, / how much freer their flight!" Here the speaker wishes for ignorance, and that seems to contradict the pride of the first stanza. But the two knowledges differ. Knowing the theme songs of oak is a matter of listening, a familiarity that comes from living beside something. Knowing the names of birds is classification, the kind of fact that can be tested and memorised. The poem suggests that names, however accurate, get between us and what they label. Every bird that is identified is also filed away, and its flight becomes an example of a species. The exclamation mark, the poem's only strong punctuation, carries a sudden, almost envious longing. There is also a pleasing ambiguity in "their flight". It could be freer for the birds, released from our labels, or freer to the speaker, who would see it fresh. Either way, the poem is questioning the value of the schooled habit of naming.
The third stanza drops into a dream: "I run / through my half-remembered high school / to catch a bus." The dream of hurrying through school is a familiar one, tied to being late or unprepared. The line itself runs, spilling over the break after "run" and then through a long middle line, so the syntax mimics the dash down the corridor. The bus is the one concrete object, and it is on the point of leaving. "Half-remembered" tells us that the building is already dissolving. Compared with the oak and the birds, school has no sensory detail at all, no sound or smell. Presumably that is the point: it survives only as a feeling of rushing and a fear of missing something. The poem never says what the bus is for, so it can read as either escape or obligation.
Formally the poem is spare. It has three tercets, no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short and conversational. Each stanza uses a different grammar of time: the settled past and present of "grew up" and "I know," the wishful conditional of "If I could," and the dream's restless present of "I run." So the poem moves from memory to wish to dream, from what the speaker has, to what he would give up, to what still unsettles him.
What makes it significant is how much it fits into so few words. Without lecturing, it sets two ways of knowing against each other: slow attention to a place, and the rapid, sorted knowledge of institutions. It also admits that the second kind still haunts the speaker's sleep, while the first only sounds in the background like firewood.