Seven lines, one street, one morning: a woman in winter clothes is talking at full volume while the trees around her are in full leaf. The poem dates itself to Saturday, May 16, 2015, and its "late-spring's early morn" fits that mid-May date. The title supplies the joke. "Trees make a bad choir" casts the woman's sermons as a performance that needs a congregation, and the only audience on hand is a row of silent trees that will not sing along.
The central idea is a mismatch. The woman is "out-of-seasonally" dressed, stuck in winter, while the trees have moved confidently on to summer. Her insistence meets a world running on its own calendar. The last word, "disbelief," carries two meanings. It can mean astonishment at her woolen cap in spring, and it can mean the unbelief of a congregation that refuses to be converted. Since trees cannot doubt anything, the disbelief is surely the speaker's projection, so the observer may be sharing it. The poem never says who she is, whether a street preacher or someone simply talking loudly. That silence keeps her from becoming a mere caricature.
The poem has no regular meter and no end-rhyme, and its single stanza is held together by line breaks. Many lines end on small, unstable words: "in," "snaps," "early." The first line ends on "in," so the woman is left hanging and then wrapped in "her winter's attire" on the next line. The break after "snaps" makes the word briefly stand alone, a small sharp crack before "off rounds of sermons" arrives. The one clear rhyme is hidden inside a line: "attire, fire-red." It makes the colour flare, and, as a reading rather than a fact, it also brings "fire and brimstone" preaching to mind.
Word choice does much of the work. "Snaps off rounds of sermons" is a packed phrase. To snap is to speak sharply, to break a twig, to take a photograph. "Rounds" suggests ammunition, so her speech arrives in short bursts like gunfire. It also suggests a round, a song sung in overlapping parts, which ties her to the choir of the title. The coined adverb "out-of-seasonally" is deliberately clumsy, three words jammed into one, and it mimics her awkward fit with the day. The poem also mixes registers. "Attire" and "morn" sound old-fashioned and formal, while "Full-on" is casual slang. The collision gives the poem a mock-grand tone, as though a small street scene were being narrated like a ceremony.
The trees are described very differently. They are "parked," a word we usually apply to cars, and it suggests an urban street where trees stand at the curb in a row, planted and unable to leave. They are a captive audience. The two sentences also move at different speeds. The first, about the woman, is made of clipped sounds: "snaps," "off," "rounds," "sermons." The second slows down into long, soft s-sounds and rising stresses: "stretch and stand / stately." "Stretch" can be read as a yawn, and "stand" as a congregation rising for a hymn. "Stately" makes the trees dignified, even a little pompous. She is agitated while they are calm, and the sound of the lines shows this before we reach the argument.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In seven lines it sets up a comic scene, an unspoken question about faith, and a quiet reversal in which the trees get the last word without making a sound. It does not mock the woman outright, nor does it side with the trees. It lets us decide who is really out of season: the person who has not noticed that spring has come, or the world that has so easily forgotten the cold. Small details do the thinking here, from a red jacket and a woolen cap to a row of leafy trees, and the final word leaves an open question about what it means to be unconvinced.