The Hundred-Year-Old Tree
Nobody planted it. That is the first thing the old men tell you, as if the absence of a planter made it more of a miracle and less of an accident.
It stands where three roads could not agree, in the triangle of dust they left behind, holding its shade out like a plate offered to whoever happens to be walking past.
In April it is generous. In August it is essential. In the year of the drought it dropped half its leaves and kept the other half, which the old men also mention, though they disagree about the year.
Under it: a plastic chair, a cat, the smell of dust after the water truck, a boy who is not supposed to be here yet and a grandfather who has been here since six.
The road was widened twice. Both times the line on the plan went round it. Somebody, in an office, with a pencil, decided that a tree was a kind of building.
It will outlive the plan, the office and the pencil. It will not outlive the boy. This is the arrangement, and the tree, which has no opinion, keeps it perfectly.
Reading it closely
Structure. Six stanzas, no rhyme, lines of uneven length. The poem is written as free verse, which lets the sentences run past the line endings. Notice where a line ends mid-thought — the absence / of a planter — and how the pause makes you hold "absence" for a moment longer than the grammar requires. That technique is enjambment.
Imagery. The poet works almost entirely in concrete nouns: a plastic chair, a cat, dust, a pencil. There are very few adjectives. This is a deliberate choice: the reader assembles the feeling from objects rather than being told what to feel.
Figurative language. The tree "holds its shade out like a plate offered" — a simile that makes shade into something like food, a thing you give away. Later the tree "has no opinion" and "keeps" the arrangement, which is personification used carefully: it grants the tree agency in one line and takes it away in the next.
Turn. The fifth stanza changes register from description to a small, dry piece of satire about the office and the pencil. The final stanza changes again, into something closer to a statement of fact. Poems often pivot like this; finding the pivot is usually the fastest route into the meaning.
Theme. Time is measured three ways in the poem: by seasons, by human memory that disagrees with itself, and by the plans of institutions. The tree outlasts all three. The last two lines refuse to be comforting, and the poem is stronger for it.