A title like "Last stand" promises a battle: cornered soldiers, a doomed position, a final act of defiance. What Dave Bonta delivers is eleven words and no enemy at all. The poem describes something or someone that "continues / ill as an ash / and straight up / in song." The central idea is that endurance can be quiet, unglamorous and even sick, and that what survives longest is not strength but voice. The "stand" here is a way of staying upright and carrying on.
The grammar is the first surprise. The poem is not a full sentence. It begins with "who," a relative pronoun that hangs from the title as if "Last stand" were a person we are being introduced to. Choosing "who" rather than "which" makes the subject a living being, even if the imagery points toward a tree. There is no capital letter, no comma and no full stop, so the sentence never closes. That suits a poem about continuing: it simply trails off the edge of the page, still going.
The middle lines hold the poem's trickiest move. Read slowly, "continues / ill" is a statement about health, and the line break lets us believe it for a moment. Then "as an ash" turns it into a simile, and a strange one. English has ready-made comparisons like "sick as a dog" and "straight as an arrow," and the poem seems to splice that pattern, pairing illness with a tree and holding "straight" back until the third line. The result is that the ear almost supplies a phrase the poem never says: *tall* or *straight as an ash*. The word "ash" also works twice. It is a tree, but it is also what is left after fire. Whether the poem means a living ash tree or what remains after burning, the image is of something diminished that still stays on its feet. Ash trees are known to suffer from disease, so "ill" may be literal, though that is an inference from the imagery, not something the poem states.
The sound of the poem does as much work as its sense. There is no rhyme, and the lines shrink steadily, from four syllables to four, then three, then two. On the page they form a narrow column, a little like a trunk. The second line is full of clipped short vowels and a hissing finish: "ill as an ash." It sounds brittle and tired. The last two lines open out. "Straight up" has a lifting, vertical motion, and "song" ends on a long vowel and a humming "ng" that can be held as long as the reader's breath lasts. So the lines get shorter while the sound gets bigger, and the poem seems to run out of body and fill with voice.
"Straight up" is also a nicely double-edged phrase. Literally it means vertical, the posture of a tree or a person refusing to lie down. In everyday speech it can also mean plainly, without decoration. Put next to "song," it suggests singing with no show, just the thing itself. That fits the poem's low-key bravery. There are no weapons in this last stand, only a refusal to stop making a sound.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of so few words. It turns a loud, militaristic phrase into something humble and quietly moving, and it leaves the subject open. The "who" could be a tree, a person in poor health, a poet, or the poem itself. That last possibility is the most satisfying, because the poem ends on the word "song" and so becomes the thing it describes: a short, thin, upright voice that carries on in spite of everything. It works well for students because it shows how one pun, one broken idiom and one carefully placed line break can hold an entire attitude toward survival.