They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.
You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.
Or you will wake at your aunt's cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.
Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.
We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You're reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.
The universal theme is just what the world means and different things in it.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
Top search results say the the theme of 'Trees' is self-identity. I think it is focusing on the silent, ever-present, resilient, lasting nature of trees compared to humans. ('We lost this game a long way back.') Delightful. Wonderful images..