Three short lines, and the title does half the work. Without "Moonshine" we might read "silver in a tree" as coins, a fish-scale glint, or frost on a branch. The title tells us it is the moon, caught in the branches. But the word also names homemade liquor, and, in older and looser usage, foolish nonsense. By the last line all three meanings are in play, and the poem turns on the pun.
The first image is quietly lovely. "Silver" suggests brightness, value and coolness, and the moon snagged in a tree looks like something caught or hung up to display. Then the poem moves down from tree to people: "the old men look upon an uneasy void." This is the only full sentence, and the only line with a verb and human figures. "Look upon" is more formal than "look at," as if the men were witnesses, or mourners. The phrase "uneasy void" is the poem's most interesting piece of wording. A void cannot be uneasy, but the men can, so the feeling slides from them onto the emptiness they face. Judging by the imagery, that emptiness is the night sky around the moon, though the poem never says so. It could just as well be age, or whatever lies ahead of old men. The poem leaves the void unexplained, and the reader has to decide how large it is.
Then comes the closing fragment, "that dry moonshine." Here the paradox sits. Moonshine the liquor is wet and warming, and it is something men drink to fill a gap in the evening. Moonshine the light is cold, reflected and without moisture. Calling it "dry" takes away comfort from both meanings: the glass is empty and the light gives no warmth. "Dry" can also suggest dry wit, and the demonstrative "that" has a shrugging, half-dismissive tone, as if someone had pointed up at the sky and muttered. The beauty of line one has been downgraded to nonsense, or at least to something that cannot satisfy anyone. Poems this short often end on a flourish. This one ends on a sour little joke.
The construction supports that deflation. Each line is its own stanza, so the white space around them reads like pauses in a conversation, or a long stare. There is no punctuation and no capital letter, which makes the poem feel overheard rather than composed. The syllable count runs five, eleven, four. That is haiku-like compression, but the middle line swells beyond the usual limit, as though the men's gaze takes longer than the images on either side. "Uneasy" slows the line down with its three soft syllables, while the final line is clipped and heavy. "Dry," "moon" and "shine" are all strongly stressed, so the poem closes with three beats in a row, like a door shutting.
There is no rhyme in the conventional sense, but sound ties the lines together. "Silver" and "void" share a *v*, which links the bright thing at the start to the empty thing in the middle, so the fullness and the emptiness are bound to each other. "Tree" and "uneasy" end on the same long vowel, and "dry" and "shine" share the long *i*, so the last line echoes inside itself. "Men" and "moon" begin with the same consonant and set the men beside the thing they are looking at.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It starts as a picture and turns into a mood. By the end it is a comment on whether beauty is enough. Its answer is wry and not altogether comforting: the moon is lovely, but looking at it does nothing to fill an empty evening. The pun carries that argument, because the word that promises both light and drink delivers only light. The poem does not say whether the old men mind, or whether they are used to it by now, and that reticence leaves the reader looking up at the tree with them.