One I made myself as an example for students. The poem at the end is my own creation about living in Sydney as a country boy.

1. Municipal Gum
By Oodgeroo Noonuccal
Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest halls
And wild bird calls
Here you seem to me
Like that poor cart-horse
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,
Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,
Whose hung head and listless mien express
Its hopelessness.
Municipal gum, it is dolorous
To see you thus
Set in your black grass of bitumen—
O fellow citizen,
What have they done to us?

2. Juxtaposition: The poet upsets our expectations by in the first line by putting
“gum tree” alongside “city street” - an unusual place for a tree.
The imagery of the “hard bitumen around its feet” reminds
me of trees I saw while living in Sydney and it is directly
contrasted with the imagery of “cool”…”leafy forest halls”
Gumtree in the city street,
Hard bitumen around your feet,
Rather you should be
In the cool world of leafy forest halls
And wild bird calls
Personification
of the tree occurs with the use of ‘your feet’ to
describe the gum tress roots. By making the tree like a
person, we respond with more empathy.

3. Simile - The poet uses an extended simile
comparing the tree to a cart horse. Much
like the tree, the horse is not the wild
stallion running free, but has been
captured, castrated and controlled in a
way which is destroying it.
Here you seem to me
Like that poor cart-horse
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged,
Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged,
Whose hung head and listless mien express
Its hopelessness.
I have chosen two images which
represent the comparison made
between the tree and the horse.
Both images show the way that
nature has been changed
unnaturally by humans.
listless = without purpose
mien= face

4. dolorous = saddening
Municipal gum, it is dolorous
To see you thus
Set in your black grass of bitumen—
O fellow citizen,
What have they done to us?
In the final lines the poet uses personification again to
make us see the tree not as a tree, not as an animal, but
now a citizen.
The beautiful contrast of “black grass of bitumen” and
the final rhetorical question “What have they done to
us?” leaves the reader thinking about the common
bond we share with nature and how society’s actions
make us both less than we should be.
There is also something in this last line of the poet’s
aboriginality, as she uses the tree as a metaphor for the
plight of urban aboriginals.

5. A sea of city traffic winding home on a balmy Friday afternoon,
a sea of geese honking incoherently on a bleak black river with bone white banks,
architectured and manufactured manscape, where the natural ebb and flow
of hill and dale has been swallowed under an ocean of concrete and glass
I swim alone in that sea in my own fowl
metal capsule, struggling against the tide of red and orange lights,
floundering my way home to kith and kin,
dreaming in the stasis of the streetlights of sunsets far from here,
vistas of varied hues and tones, horizons of granite and moss
and the promise of icy streams and frosty fields
and air so crisp you’d swear it had never been breathed before,
I suck in another breath of the recycled stench
that has been exhaled again and again by machines big and small
and wonder again
how we came to this.
City Traffic by David Dunlop