The poem takes the familiar school ritual of roll call and gives it an unsettling undertone. In three short stanzas, it suggests that the classroom is a place where young people come close to something dark: "the void." The second stanza is the oddest. "Here is a strange thing / to not desire to be" reads as a puzzled, almost offhand remark about not wanting to exist, as if the speaker is noticing the thought rather than announcing it.
The last image pulls everything together. The boys "sing their names / with broken voices," which can mean the literal cracking of voices as they change in adolescence. It can also hint at something more fragile, a brokenness underneath the answering of "here." The speaker sounds quiet and observant, maybe tender, and the mood is hushed and uneasy. Because the poem is so spare, the ordinary and the frightening sit side by side, and the reader is left to feel how closely they touch.