So they showed us the trees,
And told us to write.
Beauty and
overly-accurate descriptions
Expected.
Write about trees, they said,
But not about trees.
Write about roots,
And families,
And graves,
And anything you can stretch to
Relate to a tree.
But that's not my thing,
So I'm going to write about
Something else.

The people are staring at me.
Glaring, almost.
They don't want the teenager
On her phone.
Oh no, she should be
LISTENING.
They don't know
I'm writing poetry,
While they look for faults
In the tulip tree.
They nod their heads in agreement
To infections of the olive tree.
I'm on the ground,
So I look at their shoes.
You can tell a lot about a person
By the shoes they wear.
So they learn about trees,
While I learn about them.
I play Sherlock Holmes
And try to guess their
Personalities by their appearances,
Not really listening to the
Ranger man
Tell us about the
Growing process of a Ginkgo Tree
He talks about a Smerf,
And I absentmindedly ignore him
As I stare at the eyes
of my favorite type of tree.
I give him credit for trying,
Because while he doesn't have
My attention,
He appears to have everyone else's.
Soon, we gather around another tree.
He calls it 70 ft.
I call it big.
The sprinklers turn on,
And we laugh and move,
And we watch the squirrels
Play in the trees.
He makes a joke, and we laugh again.
It was a good time.

So I learned a lot today.
And while I came here
To learn about the trees,
I learned a whole lot more
About the people.