A tree is the one thing in a landscape that cannot move, and yet the tree in Christine La Belle's poem gives orders about movement: stay, go, come. The speaker obeys each one without question or comment. That calm obedience, and the strange silence in which the poem ends, is what the poem is about. Almost nothing is explained, and the gaps are where the poem does its work.
The commands trace a small journey: stillness, departure, return. Since the tree is rooted, it can be read as a fixed centre, a place or presence that stays put while the speaker circles around it. The poem never says what the tree stands for, and it would be a mistake to pretend it does. Judging by the text alone, it could be nature, home, a memory, or an inner voice. What the poem does show is a relationship built on trust. The speaker does not argue or ask "why?" Each command is simply followed, and the plainness of "I stayed" and "I went" makes that trust feel natural rather than forced.
The construction is strict. Each unit has two parts: a two-line stanza in which the tree speaks ("The tree said / stay."), then a one-line stanza in which the speaker answers ("I stayed."). The answer sits alone on the page, surrounded by white space, like a pause after hearing something. The poem has no rhyme and almost no decoration. Nearly every word is a single syllable, so the lines move slowly and evenly, close to the pace of someone listening.
The verbs reward a closer look. "Stay" becomes "stayed," a small change. "Go" becomes "went," a different word altogether, as if leaving changes the speaker more than staying does. Then comes "come" followed by "I come," where the word does not change at all. The command and the response are identical, and the gap between hearing and doing has closed. The tense shifts too. "Stayed" and "went" belong to the past, but "I come" is present and ongoing. The speaker is still on the way, still moving toward the tree, and the poem catches that mid-motion.
Then the pattern breaks. The final stanza reads "The tree said," with no command and no full stop, and the sentence simply stops. After three completed exchanges, the reader expects a fourth word and a fourth answer, and neither arrives. The tree might be silent, or speaking in a way that can't be written down. The speaker might be listening, or the sentence might have been cut off. The poem leaves all of this open. Because the earlier stanzas trained us to expect an answer, the missing one is felt as a gap. The reader is left in the speaker's position, waiting to be told what to do.
Small details support this. "Said" returns four times like a drumbeat, and its sound is close to "stayed," which shares its opening and closing consonants. The tree's speech and the speaker's action seem tied together even at the level of sound. There are no quotation marks, so the tree's words slide into the narration, and the voice of the tree is hard to tell apart from the speaker's own thoughts. The title, a row of three asterisks, quietly matches the three commands. It also works as a mark of omission, a way of saying that something has been left out, which anticipates the unfinished ending.
The poem's significance lies in how much it gets from so little. In under thirty words it suggests a whole relationship, with its trust, its rhythm of leaving and returning, and its willingness to listen. It also shows that a poem can end by withholding. The last line does not resolve anything but hands the question to the reader: what would you do if the voice you trusted stopped mid-sentence? Each reader will answer differently, and the poem's openness is what makes it worth rereading.