A Green Thought
Michael T. Young

Down the street, a tree stands like a geyser
that boiled up through the pavement and froze.
Folds and knobs bulge and protrude in rising
contortions, splitting upward into its green head.

It twists and leans like a drunk uncle who, always
about to fall, seems held up by some invisible hand.
His fleshy beer belly pokes out from his t-shirt,
his head hangs in too familiarly, and with

a heavy breath, insists on how proud he is of you,
the first in the family to graduate. Everyone competes
for the seat farthest from him, or tries to get him
to sit and join the general gossip at the kitchen table—

the distant niece who is pregnant at seventeen,
the cousin who was just arrested for tax evasion.
But he goes quiet, his head full of finches that flutter,
and, once in a while, take flight into the bright day.

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Michael T. Young’s Comments

This poem started from observing a tree down the block from my house and trying to describe it as best I could. It is quite unusual looking, so I wanted to capture its oddity. But as with many poems that start simply by describing, it evolved into something more, something beyond the oddity toward the insight of the eccentric, a kind of revision or even redemption of the black sheep of a family.

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