Dave Bonta's "Graffitied beech" is nine lines long, and in that space it manages a small argument about attention. A tree, a set of carved slogans and a passing bird are set side by side, and the poem never says which one matters most. The reader is left to work that out, which is where the poem gets its quiet force.
The opening image is the boldest. The beech "has seven eyes / where limbs used to be." Anyone who has looked at an old tree knows the rounded scars and knots left where a branch broke or was cut away. By calling them eyes, the poem turns a loss into a new way of seeing. The phrase "used to be" admits something has gone, but the tree is not simply diminished. Its wounds have become organs of sight, and "each of them gazing upward" gives the tree a patient, almost devotional posture. Nothing in the poem explains how the limbs were lost, and that silence lets the image stay strange and a little tender.
The second stanza drops from the canopy to eye level with the phrase "Down below," which is plain, almost conversational wording. Here the tree's other injuries appear: "the scars / of old, knife-cut graffiti." The word "scars" links this stanza to the first, since the eyes are also healed damage, but these scars were made deliberately. Then the poem quotes the carvings themselves: "Smoke Up. Fly High. Manson Lives." The form of the writing matters. These are the only fragments in the poem with capital letters and full stops after every phrase, so they sound like commands and slogans, blunt against the loose, flowing sentences around them. The name Manson, which recalls the notorious killer Charles Manson, adds a note of cheap menace, the kind of provocation a bored person might scratch into bark. The poem does not comment on any of this. It simply sets the words down, and their swagger looks small beside the tree that carries them.
The most interesting thing in the stanza is its vertical language. "Up" and "High" echo the "upward" of the first stanza, so the graffiti seems to share the tree's direction. But the carvers wanted to rise by getting high, while the tree actually reaches skyward, and the next stanza brings in a creature that really does fly. A warbler sits "in the crown / of a neighboring oak." The bird is the literal answer to "Fly High," and it needs no knife or slogan to do it. The poem makes this point through arrangement alone, which is why it feels like observation and not a lecture.
The ending shifts the poem's focus. Until now the speaker has been invisible, but the last line brings in a body: the warbler's "shadow crossing my face." The grammar leaves a small ambiguity. The "its" could belong to the bird or to the oak, so the shadow might be a flicker from a tiny wing or the broader shade of the tree. Either way, the speaker has been standing beneath the beech reading its bark, and the poem ends with a light, fleeting touch. The seven upward eyes, the sharp slogans and the passing shadow all end up registered on one person's face.
Formally, the poem is free verse in three tercets with no rhyme. Its lines are short and mostly end on natural pauses, which gives it the compression and stillness of a glimpse, close in spirit to a haiku sequence though looser in form. The sounds are gentle, as in the long vowels of "beech," "eyes," "each" and "gazing," which contrast with the clipped consonants of "knife-cut" and the carved commands.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have scolded the vandals or sentimentalized the tree, and it does neither. It lets the old scars, the healed knots and the casual bird sit together as evidence that a tree keeps a record of everything done to it and still goes on looking up. The lasting impression is of how much a quiet observer can notice, and how little that observer needs to say about it.