Wednesday Words - The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.


Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

"The Trees" by Philip Larkin, from Collected Poems: Philip Larkin, © Copyright 2004 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).