A snake has settled in the middle of a garden, and the speaker wants it gone. The opening is almost childlike in its directness: "I don't know what to do. / Someone please help me." The poem never says what the snake stands for. Judging from the imagery, it is something unwelcome that arrived, made itself at home and refused to move. That could be a person, a feeling or a habit, and the poem leaves the choice to the reader. Its central idea is that wanting something painful gone is not the same as being ready to lose it.
The poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and its stanzas run three, three, four, four, four, four and two lines. The language is plain and conversational, mostly short words in short lines, so it sounds like someone talking through a problem. The line breaks do quiet work. "In the center," sits alone as a line, as if the snake were coiled there. In "But it hisses no and continues / To resent me," the word "continues" hangs at the end of its line, and the resentment seems to drag on past the break.
The way the speaker addresses the snake changes as patience wears thin. At first the snake is reported on ("There's a snake"), then asked "Politely and gently," then written to like a stranger in a formal letter ("Dear snake"), and finally cried out to ("Oh snake in my garden"). The snake answers only with a hiss, which the speaker turns into a word: "no." Even the snake's resentment is something the speaker hears and interprets, so we only ever see the snake through the speaker's eyes. One detail complicates the speaker's side. The snake lies where "it's nice and safe." The garden is a refuge for the very thing that troubles it.
Some of the wording slips between the literal and the symbolic. The speaker asks the snake to stop "eating the leaves," though snakes do not eat leaves, which suggests the snake is a figure for something else. The near-echo of "leave" and "leaves" in the same stanza ties the speaker's wish ("I wish you could leave") to the damage being done. The garden itself seems to stand for the speaker's own space and growth. When the speaker complains that "The flowers are growing / And you're in the way," the snake becomes an obstacle to living and blooming.
The turn comes in "The snake in my garden had left me now." The phrasing matters: the snake has left *me*, not just left, and the wording sounds like abandonment rather than relief. What remains is "A hollow imprint," a flattened patch of grass that keeps the shape of the thing that was there. This is the poem's most striking image, because it shows that an absence can have a shape too. The next line says, "My tears fall and another flower grows." The two halves are joined by a plain "and," with no explanation. Grief and growth sit side by side, and the reader is left to decide whether the tears feed the flower.
The final couplet reverses the earlier plea. "I wish you could leave" becomes "I wish you didn't go." The refrain "snake in my garden" returns one last time, now addressing something that is no longer there. The words keep the snake in the garden even though the grass does not.
The poem is significant for its honesty about mixed feelings. It would have been easier to end with relief, but it ends in longing, which many readers will recognise from losing something that hurt them. The unpolished touches, such as "lays," "layed" and "theres" without its apostrophe, give the voice a raw, unedited feel that suits a poem about feelings that have not been tidied up. Because the snake is never explained, each reader can bring their own snake to the garden, and that is why the poem stays with you.