A tree with ten wings that still cannot fly sounds like the start of a riddle, and the poem treats it as one. In seven short lines, Manan Das sets a coconut tree against the whole sky: a storm pushing, clouds calling, wings on offer. The tree stays where it is. The poem asks why, and its answer is that the thing holding the tree down is the same thing that keeps it alive.
The opening line makes the poem's central contradiction without raising its voice. "Even with ten wings the coconut tree couldn't fly." The number ten is almost comic, a sign of excess. The wings are probably the long fronds of a palm, though the poem never says so, and the image suggests a creature built for flight that is somehow still planted. Having plenty of means, the line implies, is not the same as being free to use them. The last line returns to the same grammar: "Life couldn't live if uprooted." The repeated "couldn't" frames the poem like a pair of bookends, and the verbs shift from "fly" to "live." Flying is what the tree might want; living is what it needs.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular beat. Its lines vary in length, and that variation does real work. Line four, "Let's go let's go...", is the shortest and fastest, with no punctuation between the repeated words and a trailing ellipsis. It sounds like a chant, or like a crowd of voices that never quite finishes its sentence. The clouds speak "with sonorous voice," a rich, resonant phrase that makes the temptation attractive rather than threatening. Next to it, the storm is described in a dryly humorous way: it "helped him too much." Help is normally welcome, so "too much" turns the storm into an overeager friend whose assistance is really force. The sky in this poem does not attack the tree. It persuades and pushes.
The earth answers more quietly, and its language is the most interesting in the poem. The earth "would confine him with affection of life." "Confine" belongs to prisons, "affection" to families, and the line refuses to choose between them. The phrasing is slightly unusual, and that helps. "Affection of life" is not quite how an English speaker would say it, so the reader slows down and turns the phrase over. "Strong binding" works the same way. A binding can be a rope, a vow or the spine of a book, something that restrains and also holds together. The poem never settles whether the tree is held or kept, and that uncertainty is where its feeling lives.
The final two lines change register. After the clouds, the storm and the personified earth, the poem drops into plain, almost scientific statement: roots and soil are bound together, and an uprooted life cannot go on. After the storm and the singing, this is the sentence left standing. The tree does not complain or dream aloud, and the poem never calls its fate sad. The calm is deliberate. The tree is "him," a small personification that makes the staying feel like a character's quiet decision rather than simple inability.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it resists the usual story. Poems about wings and sky usually celebrate escape. Here the escape is available, loud and flattering, and the poem still sides with the roots, without pretending roots are free. Its argument is that some attachments are conditions of life rather than limits on it. A student might read the tree as a person tied to a home, a family or a place, but the poem leaves that open and keeps its image concrete. Anyone who has felt the pull of "Let's go let's go..." and also the pull of the ground will recognise both voices, and the poem is honest enough to give each of them a line.