A workday on a timbered slope becomes, in Risa Bear’s “Sixteen,” a quiet confrontation with mortality. Three bare stanzas set a human action—planting fir seedlings—against a landscape full of older trees, wind, and falling debris. The speaker and a companion are not alone in the cold; they are under trees that “scrape and worry / in moaning winds,” and that moaning turns out to be more than sound. By the final question, the poem has moved from planting to survival, asking whether the speaker will see the other person again.
The construction is as spare as the scene. The lines are short, mostly two or three stresses, unrhymed, and shaped by enjambment. “We plant fir / seedlings across / icy slopes” splits the species from its young form and places “seedlings” at the start of a line, where the word feels small and breakable. The lack of rhyme keeps the ear close to speech and wind, while line breaks create hesitation, as if the speaker is bending and straightening between tasks. In the second stanza, the verbs grow tense and personified: the standing trees “scrape and worry,” as if they are both making noise and feeling strain. The phrase “yet standing” suggests that others have already fallen, so the forest is not a stable backdrop but a field of potential collapse. Then the image sharpens: the wind is “moaning,” and the trees are “showering us with / bark and cones.” Because the line turns on “with,” the reader briefly sees a shower before knowing it is made of bark and cones; the debris arrives almost gently, but it is debris, not rain, and it comes from above.
The word “us” is small but crucial. It establishes that the speaker is not working alone. The address “Will I see you / again” is intimate and plain, entirely unlike the wind-moaned language around it. The sudden simplicity makes the question feel exposed. The condition that follows is suspended across three line breaks: “should one / of these fall / while my back / is bent?” The syntax mimics the danger by delaying the outcome, and the final word, “bent,” leaves the speaker in a posture of labor and blindness. A bent back cannot watch the trees; it can only hear them. The poem therefore turns a practical risk—a falling limb or trunk during tree planting—into an existential one: the work of planting for the future is done while the present may kill you.
The title “Sixteen” adds another layer without resolving anything. It may suggest a young speaker, an age, a number of seedlings, or some other threshold. If read as an age, the title makes the speaker a sixteen-year-old learning, in a very bodily way, how future and danger share the same moment. But the poem does not insist on that reading. What it insists on is the overlap between tenderness and risk. Planting fir seedlings is an act of care for a future forest, yet it happens on “icy slopes” under trees that “scrape and worry.” The older trees shower the workers with bark and cones; the new growth is barely more than a twig. Both timescales meet in the speaker’s body, which is bent low, vulnerable, and still hoping to see someone again.
That hope is what makes the poem significant. Bear takes a small, unglamorous moment of manual labor and lets it carry large feeling without becoming sentimental. The poem does not need a storm or a dramatic accident; the moaning wind and falling bark are enough. Its final question remains unanswered, which is exactly right: danger in such work is not a single event but a condition. The speaker keeps planting, keeps asking, and the reader is left listening for the sound of a tree about to fall.