Three short statements, no punctuation, no capital letters except the lone "I": Dave Bonta's "Taking attendance" looks almost like a register itself, a few entries ticked off one at a time. Yet it holds more than its size suggests. It is about a childhood ritual, saying "present" when your name is called, and about how that ritual outlasts childhood. It also suggests that language is something we are handed, not something we invent.
The first line, "school used to be a time of lead," can be heard in several ways at once. Lead is heavy, so school was time that dragged, like an afternoon spent watching the clock. Lead is also the word we use for the core of a pencil, so the schoolroom's own equipment slips into the metaphor. And lead is dull and grey, the opposite of bright, which colours the memory. The poem never picks one meaning, and the flat, matter-of-fact tone lets them all stand. "Used to be" matters too, because it puts school firmly in the past. The title then suggests what has changed: someone is now taking attendance, so the speaker seems to have moved from the desk to the front of the room. That is an inference from the title, but it fits the way the poem looks back.
The second line, "I was sworn to answer present," turns on a pun. "Sworn" belongs to courtrooms and churches, and it makes a roll call sound like an oath. The verb is passive, too: the child was sworn, and did not choose. Then comes "present," which means here, in the room. It also means a gift, and it names a grammatical tense. That last sense prepares the ground for the final stanza, where grammar comes into the open. The sound of the lines helps. The first ends on "lead," a single stressed syllable that lands like a dropped weight. The second ends on "present," whose stress falls early so the word trails away. The heaviness seems to lift in the space of a line.
The last stanza is the only one with two lines and the only one with a full metaphor: "the grammar of children is an old shop / found in a new place." Children's grammar is the way they actually talk, with its absorbed rules and its odd, charming mistakes. The poem pictures it as an old shop, a place of secondhand goods and inherited stock. The children are the new place where it has turned up. Every child speaks a language far older than they are, using words and patterns worn smooth by generations before them, and "present" is one of those words. A teacher calling names might hear his own old answer coming back in a younger voice.
"Found" is also a word of pleasure. Nobody finds a shop on purpose. You come across it, and the discovery feels like luck. After the leaden time and the oath, the poem ends on surprise and something close to warmth. One might even catch a faint echo of alchemy, lead turning into something worth keeping, though the poem never says so. The move from "time" in the first line to "place" in the last also gives the poem a quiet shape: it travels from the past to a spot where the speaker is standing now.
There is no rhyme, and the lines are loose, running from about seven syllables to ten and then down to five. The short final line is made of plain, monosyllabic words, so the poem ends simply, with no flourish. The white space between stanzas does the work punctuation would normally do. It also feels like the pause after a name is called, when everyone waits for the answer.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It shows that routines that felt like burdens, the obedience and repetition, can become a kind of inheritance. And it never tells the reader whether to feel nostalgic or relieved. Reading it takes seconds, about as long as calling one name, but it leaves you facing its own question: are you present?