Most poems about death want a monument. Jason Ridpath's "Tree" asks for something messier and more alive: "Place me in the earth." The line is an instruction, close to a request written into a will, and its plain, undecorated tone carries through the whole poem.
The central idea is that death can be a handing-over rather than an ending. The speaker pictures their body as part of the soil: "Seeds and a heavy layer of dirt. / From my decaying mortality. / New life will spring." Look at the vocabulary. "Mortality" is an abstract, slightly clinical word, but it sits among very physical ones: earth, seeds, dirt. Death stops being an idea to fear and becomes a process, something that happens in the ground. And "decaying" is answered at once by "spring," a verb of sudden upward movement that also, hard not to hear, names the season of renewal.
The next lines are strikingly modest. "If nothing else a tree" makes no promise of heaven or fame. The speaker asks only to be a tree, and the following line rhymes it with "me": "To remind you of me." That rhyme is the first in the poem, and it quietly joins the two words, so the tree isn't a symbol standing in for the speaker so much as the speaker in another form. Then comes a widening of pronouns. "To remind you of me. / To remind you of us. / To remind us all of the source..." The repeated "To remind" works like a drumbeat, and each repetition enlarges the circle: from "me" to "you," then "us," then "us all." By the third repetition the dead person and the living reader belong to the same group.
The imagery loosens at this point. A tree is easy to picture, but "the source and how it flows" suddenly sounds like water or a current, and the poem never says what the source is. Life, perhaps, or whatever connects living things; the text leaves it open. The directions that follow, "Left, right, above, and below," fit a tree well, with its roots down, branches up and growth spreading sideways. They also describe something with no edges at all, which is why the next line has to admit its limits: "In all the ways we will never know." The speaker does not pretend to understand the cycle, only to trust it.
The poem's form supports this humility. There is no regular meter, and the lines are short, mostly end-stopped with full stops, so each statement lands separately, rather like seeds dropped one at a time. Several are fragments. "Seeds and a heavy layer of dirt" and "If nothing else a tree" have no verbs, as if the speaker is too tired or too calm for full sentences. "From my decaying mortality" is cut off from "New life will spring" by a full stop where we might expect a comma, which makes the pause heavier and the turn from death to life more deliberate.
Rhyme gathers only at the end. "Below," "know" and "grow" share a long, open *o* sound that can be held in the mouth, and after so many clipped lines the effect is of finally exhaling. The last line is also the longest and the most conversational: "If we are breathing, we've still got time to grow." It swerves away from the speaker's burial and speaks to whoever is reading. The condition it sets is almost startling in its smallness. Not talent, not youth, only breath. Even the word "still" works twice: it means "yet," but it also stands against the stillness of the grave that opened the poem. And "grow" is exactly what a tree does, so the final word completes the image the poem began with.
What makes the poem worth reading is that turn. It begins as a poem about being buried and ends as a poem about how to live, and it does so in everyday language that never feels like a lecture until the last line, where the moral is stated outright rather than left to the imagery. Some readers may find that a little too neat; others will find it generous, like a friend finishing a hard conversation with a kind word. Either way, the poem leaves its reader with a small, practical task: grow, while there is still breath.