The speaker of "Seeing" never claims to have done any of what she describes. She only says, "I read a story in a book about / trees and leaves and moss and such." The experience reaches us thirdhand: a book tells of a story, the speaker passes it on, and we are left to decide whether to try it. The casual "and such" makes the source sound like an ordinary book, not a mystical text, which makes the poem's final promise more surprising.
The central idea is a reversal of who is looking. We usually think of a forest as something we look at. Here the forest looks back. Beneath the leaves, "small lives" cling to "the magic of quiet and concealment," and a person sitting still against a trunk can "feel the blinks of tiny, seeing eyes boring / through their ceiling." That word "ceiling" turns the world upside down. The ground we walk on is the roof of someone else's house, and we are the weather above it. The title does not say who is doing the seeing, and the poem lets it be both parties. Notice also the verb: you do not see these eyes, you *feel* their blinks. Seeing becomes something closer to being aware of, or being noticed.
Newberry builds this in free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed meter. Her lines hover around ten syllables but never settle into a pattern, so the poem sounds like someone telling a story aloud. The line endings do much of the work. Again and again a line stops on a word that cannot finish a thought: "about," "around," "a," "of." "Just around / root and ring" and "your back braced against a / tree trunk" both drop the reader down the page to complete the sentence, as though we were digging toward something hidden. The syntax adds to this. The poem is one long, winding set of instructions made of nested conditions: "if you sat," "if you are lucky / enough," "if you pull the silence up." Each "if" is a step toward the final reward, and none of them is hard. You need only sit, stay quiet, and have someone with you.
The imagery shifts from the earthy to the domestic. The earth's "crust" suggests something baked, and silence is pulled "up / under your chin like a quilt." That image makes quiet into bedding, something that warms and protects. It also echoes the "quiet and concealment" of the creatures below, so the sitter ends up sharing the hidden creatures' condition: still, covered, unseen. The "child or a / lover" is placed in the same gentle register. The poem treats company as part of the luck, not an extra.
The last sentence moves from the small to the grand. After tiny blinking eyes and a circle of cleared leaves, the sitter can "sleep / and dream the dreams of kings and queens and claim / the gifts of gods." The hard "k" and "g" sounds in "claim the gifts of gods" give the final phrase a ring of treasure and ceremony, and the poem ends on the heavy, single-syllable "gods." The humility of the setting, a patch of dirt and a tree trunk, is rewarded with something royal. Yet there is a quiet irony in a poem called "Seeing" that ends with the sitter asleep. The final vision is a dream, and it comes with closed eyes. The seeing has passed to the creatures underground, and the human's part is to rest and receive.
The poem's significance lies in this exchange. It suggests that attention is not something we simply aim at the world. If we are quiet enough, we may find ourselves the ones being attended to, and that can be restful rather than frightening. The phrase "as I have told you" adds a small, confiding authority to the voice, which draws the reader in as a listener rather than a spectator. Whether or not the story is true, the poem makes the case that listening to a story, and then sitting down in the leaves to test it, is a way of making the world larger.