Maple trees are usually praised for their color, but Mary F. C. Pratt's poem keeps asking what that color costs and what it pays for. In four short stanzas she gives the tree a whole year of life, then adds two numbered fragments that turn the poem upside down. After all the looking up at leaves and light, the last instruction is to look at the ground.
The main device is personification, and it moves through stages of a woman's life, or at least through stages of a role. First come the "sweet ladies in green, / whispering secrets, / flirting with birds," where young leaves rustling sound like gossip. Then the "bold ladies in scarlet" throw their "favors / profligate to the winds, / the soils, the streets." *Profligate* is a bookkeeper's word, meaning wasteful, but the list it introduces undercuts the accusation. Fallen leaves feed the soils, so the apparent waste is a kind of circulation. "Streets" is a small jolt, since the tree's generosity also lands in the human world, where someone has to sweep it up.
The third stanza strips everything back. "Skeletons of ladies, / cracking / their knuckles / in the night" is built from lines that shrink until single words sit alone, so the reader hears branches creaking in the dark. The image is faintly eerie, but knuckle-cracking is also a casual, almost cheeky gesture, so winter reads as waiting rather than death.
The fourth stanza then refuses the ending we expect. After skeletons we get "Generous ladies– / oh how generous!–", the only exclamation in the poem. The imagery suggests maple sap and syrup: they fill "our mouths / with blood made of light." The phrase connects back to the first stanza, where the leaves were "drawing sugar from the sky," and completes a chain from sunlight to leaf to sap to human mouth. "Blood" gives the gift a double edge. It is nourishing, but it is also something taken from a living body. The breathless dashes could be gratitude, or gratitude with a little guilt in it.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its order comes from repetition. Every stanza opens with a type of lady (sweet, bold, skeletal, generous), and each is built on present participles (*whispering, flirting, drawing, throwing, cracking, filling*) that keep the action ongoing, as if the cycle never stops. The stanzas end on concrete nouns: sky, streets, night, light. The first and last of those frame the year in brightness, with the dark and the pavement between them.
Then the numbered sections change the voice. "You see what is there: / the dying trees" is flat and blunt, like someone dismissing the poem's tenderness as sentiment. The poem doesn't say whether "dying" means the seasonal fall or something larger. Either way, the next questions, "What can the sun do? / The wind?", expose the weakness of that view. Sun and wind were the tree's partners earlier, supplying sugar and carrying leaves, and here they are shown to be powerless on their own. The answer comes in section 2, which is the poem's only command: "Learn to worship dirt, / to worship water." *Worship* borrows the language of religion for the humblest things, and the closing line, "Under your feet is / every thing you need," splits "everything" into two words, so that each thing seems counted out separately.
That reversal is what gives the poem its significance. The sky has all the glamour (light, color, flight), but the poem insists that the tree's abundance rests on what is hidden and low. Its argument works because it comes after the ladies, whose vivid, slightly mischievous personalities make the reader care about the tree before being told that the tree's life depends on soil and water. In about a hundred words, it turns an admiring portrait of one species into a lesson in humility and gratitude, and in where to look for the source of things.