Five short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters: "Terminal" looks as if it has been left lying on the page like a note. Yet it holds a whole situation, a father nearing death and a child who is far away or helpless to prevent it, and then it adds a single strange image that changes how we read everything before it.
The first stanza is plain, almost reportorial. "Alone in the west / her father is now every day / meeting with the end." We never learn who "her" is, or who is telling us. The speaker stands at a distance, and the daughter exists only as a pronoun attached to the dying man. That choice feels deliberate. The grief has no face, and the poem holds back from the emotional language we might expect. The syntax is also slightly unsettled. "Alone in the west" could describe the father, or it could describe the daughter, separated from him by a great distance. Because there is no punctuation to decide it, the aloneness spreads across both people.
The phrase "meeting with the end" is the most interesting piece of wording in the first stanza. We normally say someone is "facing" death or "approaching" it. "Meeting" makes it sound like an appointment, something put in a diary and repeated. "Now every day" supports that reading: dying is no longer a single event but a routine, something visited daily. The line is the longest of the five, and it drags a little, which suits the idea of time stretching out. Then "west" does quiet work too. It is simply a direction, but the west is also where the sun goes down, and the word sits there with that old association, whether or not the poet intended it.
The title is another kind of double meaning. "Terminal" is the medical word for an illness that cannot be cured, but it also names the last station on a line, the place where journeys end and people wait to be met. The poem lets both meanings work at once: a diagnosis and a destination. It also suggests, in a gentler way, that someone is arriving.
Then comes the turn: "a tree in a corner / would sing of water." Nothing joins this to the first stanza, no "like" or "as," so the reader has to build the bridge. The key word is "would." This is not a tree that sings but one that would sing, in some imagined or conditional situation. A tree "in a corner" is also cramped and overlooked, perhaps a houseplant in a room or a lone tree at the edge of a field, and it sings "of" water rather than to it or for it. The song is a longing for something not currently present. Judging by the imagery, the tree may stand in for the father, thirsty for what is leaving him, or for the daughter, who can offer only a song instead of real help. It may even be the poem itself, a small and modest song made out of absence. The text does not choose among these, and the openness is part of the point.
The sound of the poem is subtle, with no rhyme and no fixed meter. Long "ee" sounds run through "meeting," "every," and "tree," linking the human and the natural worlds. The poem begins with "west" and ends on "water," and the shared w of "would" in between forms a faint frame around the whole. The shape is a three-line stanza followed by a two-line one, which recalls the five-line tanka tradition of Japanese short verse, although the syllable counts here are not strict. Like a tanka, it is built on a pivot: observation first, then image.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It never says "sad" or "death" outright, and it trusts a conditional verb and a tree in a corner to carry the feeling. The final image does not console, since the tree only would sing, but it moves the poem from reporting grief to imagining a response to it. A hopeless situation is answered by a gesture that is small, musical, and a little thirsty, and that is why the ending lingers.