Trees, 2020

 Adapted from "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see

a poem lovely as a tree—

 

A tree that towers to the sky

but touches earth near you and I—

 

A tree that seems so strong and old

as fall approaches, turns it gold—

 

A tree that speaks in rustling leaves,

an Entish tongue, that also grieves

 

A tree that stood so very long,

yet comes a storm, and it is gone.

 

Poems are made by fools, like me,

who pause today to mourn a tree.

_______

This poem is just a little weekend exercise in romanticism. The pictures come from my neighbor's yard, where the derecho that hit the area on August 11, 2020 did significant damage to two of the beautiful old trees. Kilmer's original poem is a perennial favorite, and if it feels like it belongs on a Hallmark card, I try to remember that he wrote it during WWI, when the idea of a tree, say in that ruined space we call "no man's land," was a memory, not a reality; thus, the original poem reconstructs a tree via personification that, on analysis, is nonsensical. But then, that's the point, I think. It's a poem, the poet a fool. For the very religious Kilmer, trees are not something we can make or remake, but we can appreciate them.

As Shug describes it in The Color Purple:

    "I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it. [. . . ] She say, my first step from old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people."

Yet how much I feel, per Celie's reaction to Shug's vision, that in this world we currently live in, I just want to conjure a rock and throw it.