Three short stanzas, a pale girl, and a tree growing out of her shoulder: "Trees We Carry" by LenaTerhaar is built on one strange picture, and then it turns that picture around to face the reader. On the surface it describes a fragile girl with an impossible burden. Its central idea is that the burden is not impossible at all, because everyone carries something like it. The tree is deliberately left unexplained, so it can stand for whatever weighs on a person and has become part of them.
The first stanza builds the girl almost entirely out of contrasts and body language. Her hair is "as white as fresh snow," an image of purity and coldness, and the word "fragile" tells us how to read it: she looks breakable. Yet inside her, things are loud. Her "heart pounding" suggests fear, effort or distress, and her "stomach growling" adds a more basic need. The poem never says whether this is hunger or anxiety, and both readings work. Notice, too, that the stanza moves downward, from hair to heart to stomach. By the end of it she is described only in terms of what her body is going through.
The second stanza introduces the tree, and the verb matters. It "grows" off her shoulder. It is not strapped on or dragged behind her. A growing thing is alive, and it keeps getting bigger, which suggests a burden that began small and is still developing. The shoulder is a quiet pun on the everyday idea of carrying a weight on your shoulders. Against the white of the first stanza, the tree is "black," and the poem links it to her eyes. The next line is oddly built: "and them, you can't even see." The word order is twisted, probably to land on the rhyme with "tree," but the twist has a real effect. We are told the eyes are black, then told we cannot see them, so the girl's inner life stays hidden. Judging by the imagery, the tree is as unreadable as her eyes. We see its outline but not what it means to her.
That is why the third stanza begins by handing the interpretation over: "What the tree represents, / is up to you." The poem declines to name an illness, a grief or a secret. That openness is a strength, since a reader can lay their own experience over the image. The snowy white and the bare black shape also seem to suggest winter, though the poem never says so.
The form is simple and songlike. Each stanza has four lines, and only the second and fourth rhyme: "snow" with "below," "tree" with "see," "you" with "too." The first and third lines are left unrhymed, so every stanza feels slightly unresolved until its last word arrives. The rhythm is loose and speech-like, with lines of uneven length. The long second line of the first stanza, for example, stretches beyond its neighbors. This irregularity keeps the poem from sounding like a nursery rhyme, even though the rhymes are plain. A few phrasings are clearly shaped by the rhyme, like "below" and the inverted "them, you can't even see," and a stricter reader might call them slightly awkward. But the plainness suits a poem that wants to sound like a friend talking.
The most important move comes in the pronouns. The poem begins with a distant "girl," shifts to "you" in the final stanza, and ends on "we." The title already said "we," but the reader only understands it at the last line. "But remember my friend" is a sudden softening, almost a hand on the arm. After picturing the girl as an odd, fragile figure, we are told she is not an exception. The final "too" is the smallest word in the poem and arguably the heaviest, because it takes her out of isolation and puts her among us.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats a hidden struggle neither as a spectacle nor as something to be fixed. It only asks us to recognize it, in her and in ourselves.