Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
From Woody’s column archives, spring 2013, evoked by recently seeing a fallen tree…
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A century and change ago, Joyce Kilmer penned “Trees” with one of the most widely familiar opening couplets in America poetry:
I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.
The other morning I gazed out my window and across the street as a lovely “poem” got sawed down, cut up, turned into woodchips, and trucked away. It was like witnessing a theatrical street version of Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book “The Giving Tree” starring two workmen in white hardhats and optic-yellow vests.
Actually, this story was even sadder for this tree’s limbs would not be used to build a house for the grown boy; its trunk not crafted into a boat to sail the seas. When the workmen’s work was finished, there remained not even a stump to sit and rest upon.
This tree had soared majestically, perhaps 70 feet into the clouds, tall and leafy, with a trunk too thick to reach one’s arms around. Alas, it had become a botanical Leaning Tower of Pisa, cracking and raising a section of sidewalk and in danger of falling across a busy street.
And so at 9 a.m. on a May gray day, a whining chainsaw made the morning more leaden. Standing in the basket of a gargantuan cherry-picker, a workman amputated the large branches one by one by one as he hydraulically rose higher Higher HIGHER.
Far below, the felled branches were cut into manageable lengths and fed into a woodchipper roaring loud as a jet engine. Lines of a lovely “poem” went in, lousy mulch came out.
Lastly, the towering tall barren trunk came down, made not into long lumber for a home or boat, but into short logs to be burned in fireplaces. This was not a heartwarming thought.
Start to finish, what had taken many decades of the four seasons to become living poetry was erased in a less than four hours. It was tree-mendously sad.
Kilmer again: A tree that may in summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair.
No more birds will nest in the lovely tree I used to admire out my kitchen window, looking east, the sun lifting above it in the late mornings of springtime.
The melancholy event gave me pause to think about a handful of memorable trees from my life: the evergreen beside the driveway of my earliest boyhood home that my two older brothers and I attempted blind shots over while playing H-O-R-S-E; the sturdy buckeye, near a swimming pond, with a hanging rope we swung on like Tarzan; the apple tree I picked snacks from on a shortcut home from grade school; the orange tree my two then-young kids and I planted; the giant redwoods we saw, in awe, as a family; and on and on.
I think “poems” fill our lives more than we often realize. We draw trees in kindergarten and as older kids climb trees and hopefully one day we plant a tree in deference to this Greek proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
Kilmer once more: Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.
Afterwards, this curious fool sought to determine how old the tree had been by counting its rings, but the stump was cut off below ground level and covered with dirt.
I may be overestimating by half, but I like to imagine this poetic tree had sprouted in 1913 – the same year “Trees” came into the world.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.