Everyone knows the joke: a grandparent insists they walked to school uphill both ways, through snow, barefoot. Dave Bonta borrows that boast for his title and then does something quieter with it. He keeps the walk but swaps the exaggeration for a precise, strange inventory of what a child passes on the way to a place he doesn't want to be. The poem is about the gap between a mind that learns through the body and the landscape, and a school that reduces the world to counting. By the end, the hill of the title has become less a physical slope than the feeling of being pushed uphill, always, toward the classroom.
The opening is its most startling move. "The sun was a letter / of the alphabet then." A child's sense of the world is gloriously mixed up here: the sun isn't like a letter, it simply is one. The next lines go further: "my stomach could pronounce it / better than my mouth." Knowledge sits in the gut, ahead of speech. The poem doesn't say whether the stomach is hungry, nervous, or simply wise, and that ambiguity helps. Judging by the imagery, the sun's round shape may be hinting at an O, which matters because the poem's last image is a zero.
The middle is a procession of places, and the syntax is the clever part. After the first lines, the poem has almost no verbs of walking. Instead it strings together prepositions: "through," "past," "along," "up over," "past," "down into." The reader is carried along the route by small directional words, which gives the poem its forward drag. The line breaks add to this. "Along train tracks we knew / to get off of when / they started to hum" breaks on "when," so the sentence itself hangs for a moment, like a child listening for a train. The humming rails are one of the poem's best details, since they show knowledge held in the ears and feet, shared by a "we" who never needed to be taught.
The landscape is damaged but alive. The children walk "through / two centuries of wreckage," past "a ghost village" and a town whose end is "eaten / by the interstate." The word "eaten" quietly echoes the earlier stomach, so the town seems to have been swallowed. The wooded hill, with its "water tank and cemetery," puts utilities and death side by side, plain parts of an ordinary place. Then comes the gentlest image: "hidden rooms / with walls of wild grapevines / whispering truancy." Nature builds rooms, with walls, and uses them to tempt the children away from school. The alliteration of "walls," "wild" and "whispering" makes the line sound like the hush it describes.
That is why the arrival hits so hard. The poem has no rhyme, no punctuation and a loose, uneven rhythm, moving mostly in short stanzas of two and three lines. After all that drifting freedom, the school is "industrial," a word that sounds like a factory and that fits the post-industrial ruin the children have just walked through. It is "a prison of numbers," a metaphor made sharper by the "hidden rooms" earlier: grapevine walls invite you in, but these walls hold you. Letters, which began as the sun, have given way to numbers.
The closing couplet is a small riddle: "where zero seemed to hold / all the keys." Zero is nothing, yet it has the power here. It might be a bad grade, or the emptiness of the lesson, or the way a child feels that a blank holds all the authority. The verb "seemed" keeps it in a child's perspective, uncertain but absolutely felt. It also completes a shape, because the round sun-letter of the opening and the round zero of the end are the poem's two bookends. One is a source of light and the other is a locked door.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it turns a worn-out cliché into something with real stakes. The grandparent's story is about hardship, but Bonta's is about what school costs a mind that has learned to read the world directly. And he makes that point without a single complaint, only by walking us up the hill and down into the room.