Three short lines, one gentle gust of wind, and a whole movement from sway to stillness: Will's "Trees" is about the quiet beauty of things coming down to earth. It starts in the air, with branches moving, and ends on the ground. Everything between is a slow glide downward. We usually think of trees as symbols of upward growth, so the poem's central idea is a small surprise. Its grace lies in descent, in the way a tree gives itself back to the ground it grew from.
The form is tight. The syllables fall into a 5-7-5 pattern: "Trees sway in the breeze" has five, "Gracefully spreading their leaves" has seven, and "'Til they reach the ground" has five. That is the arrangement familiar from haiku, though the poem's subject matter is simply the natural scene itself. The longer middle line matters. It is where the leaves actually spread, and the line stretches to match them, while the shorter lines on either side work like the sway at the start and the landing at the end. The poem also has no punctuation at all. It is a single sentence that flows from line to line without a pause, and the second line runs straight into the third. The syntax mimics a movement that never needs to stop and restart.
Sound does a great deal of the work. "Trees" and "breeze" rhyme inside the opening line, and the long "ee" carries on through "leaves" and "reach," so the vowel keeps the poem drifting along. Then comes "ground," the first stressed word with a completely different sound, ending on a closed, firm "d." The change feels like arrival. The poem's music stops where the leaves do. Meanwhile the soft, hissing consonants of "sway," "breeze," and "spreading" give the lines a hush that suggests wind moving through foliage.
The word choices are small but precise. "Breeze" tells us this is no storm, and the wind is mild enough to be pleasant. "Sway" has a back-and-forth rhythm built into it. "Gracefully" is the only word in the poem that offers a judgment rather than a picture. It is also the longest word, three syllables that slow the line down so the reader moves at the same unhurried pace as the trees. It quietly personifies them, too, because grace is a quality we usually give to dancers. "Spreading" adds to that impression. It is an open, generous gesture, like arms stretching wide.
The most interesting word is "reach." Reaching is something people do, and when trees reach in poems it is almost always upward, toward light. Here the reach is downward. The final line also leaves a delightful ambiguity in "they." It could mean the trees, or it could mean the leaves. Judging by the imagery, we might picture drooping branches trailing to the earth, or leaves drifting down in the wind, and the poem doesn't choose between them. Both readings share the same downward motion, so the uncertainty enriches the poem rather than blurring it. "'Til" adds a sense of time as well. It suggests a process that takes a while, a patient movement with a destination rather than a single frozen snapshot.
What makes the poem worth reading closely is its restraint. There is no "I," no stated feeling, no lesson announced. Will gives us a scene and trusts us to feel something about it, perhaps calm, perhaps the gentle sadness of something settling. The lack of a final full stop adds to this. The leaves have reached the ground, yet the sentence never formally ends, so the scene seems to go on after the words stop.
For a student learning how poems work, "Trees" is a useful example of how much can be done with very little. Line length mirrors action, a single vowel sound holds the lines together, one switch of sound marks the ending, and one verb, "reach," turns an ordinary image upside down. Its modest size makes each of these choices easy to see, and each of them is doing real work.