Eleven words, counting the title, and the title does much of the work. "Where we sat" gives the poem a place and a "we", and it puts them in the past tense. What follows is a pair of short lines: "with great ease / the oak lives or dies." Nothing says who "we" are or why they sat there. The poem trusts a small scene to carry a large thought, which is that a living thing's survival or death can happen without drama, and that people may look on with surprising calm.
The most interesting feature is the way the title leaks into the body. Read straight through, the title and first line make a complete clause: "Where we sat with great ease." The sitters are comfortable, relaxed, at home in the spot. Then the second line turns and the same phrase seems to migrate. "With great ease the oak lives or dies" makes the ease belong to the tree, which now lives or dies effortlessly. The phrase "with great ease" sits on a hinge, and the line break lets it swing in both directions. Because there is no punctuation anywhere, the poem never settles which grammar it prefers. The reader ends up feeling both kinds of ease at once, the human kind and the arboreal kind, and that doubling is where the poem's meaning sits.
The choice of tree matters too. An oak is the conventional emblem of endurance, so we expect strength, long life, perhaps defiance. The poem gives us something quieter: an oak that either lives or dies, and does either without strain. Setting the traditional image of toughness against "ease" takes the heroism out of it. The tree is not fighting to survive, and its death, if it comes, is not a tragedy staged for us. This is a calmer, almost Zen-like view of mortality, in which living and dying are two outcomes of the same unforced process.
The small word "or" deserves attention. It sets life and death side by side as equal possibilities, and it places no weight on either. Compare how differently "the oak lives and dies" would read, or "the oak dies." The "or" suggests that at this moment the outcome is undecided, or that the speaker doesn't much mind which it is. The present tense adds to the effect. Against the past tense of "sat," "lives or dies" has the feel of a general truth, something that goes on being the case after the sitting has ended. The people have gone, or the moment has, and the oak's condition remains open.
The sound of the lines is spare. The first has three syllables and the second five, so the poem is shorter than a conventional haiku and has no fixed pattern. The first line is almost a run of stresses, "with GREAT EASE," slow and level, which fits its meaning. The second line is steadier: "the OAK lives OR DIES." There is no rhyme, but "ease" and "dies" end on the same buzzing z, a faint echo that pulls the lines together without announcing itself. The long vowels in "great," "ease," "oak" and "dies" slow the reading, so the poem seems to take its time even though it is over in seconds.
What makes it worth reading is how much it leaves out and how well the omissions work. Nothing explains why the oak might die, whether from age, weather or something else, and nothing tells us what the speakers feel beyond the ease the title implies. The reader has to supply the setting, perhaps a bench, a log, a patch of shade, and then decide whether the calm is wisdom or indifference. Is it healthy to watch a life end without panic, or does the "great ease" hide a failure to care? The poem will not say. It sets a human moment of rest beside a natural moment of survival or loss, and lets the gap between them stay open. For a poem this short, that open question is a good reason to read it twice.