From Lovely “Poem” to Wood Chips

One hundred years ago, Joyce Kilmer penned “Trees” with one of the most widely familiar opening couplets in American poetry:

I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.

The other morning I looked out my window and across the street as a lovely “poem” got sawed down, cut up, turned into wood chips and trucked away.

It was like seeing a theatrical street version of Shel Silverstein’s classic children’s book “The Giving Tree” starring two workmen in white hard hats and optic-yellow vests.

Actually, this story was even sadder for this tree’s limbs were not 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 was not even a stump left to sit and rest upon.

An arborist could tell you what type of tree this was, but I cannot. Were I to venture a guess, wise readers would surely point out my ignorance. No matter. What is important is it was majestic, perhaps 70 feet tall and leafy with a trunk I could not reach my arms around.

Something else important: the tree had become a botanical Leaning Tower of Pisa, cracking and raising a section of sidewalk. And if it toppled, it would fall across a busy street. Too large to be braced or straightened, the tree was a danger that surely needed to come down.

And so at 9 a.m., a whining chain saw turned an overcast morning tenfold gloomier. Standing in the basket of a gargantuan cherry-picker, a workman cut off the large branches one by one by one as he hydraulically rose higher and higher and higher.

Far below, the felled branches were cut into manageable lengths and fed into a wood chipper that roared like a jet engine. Lines of a “poem” went in, mulch came out.

And then the tall, barren trunk came down, made not into lumber for a home or boat, but into short logs to be burned in fireplaces. This was not a heartwarming thought.

From start to finish, what took decades and decades to become living poetry was eliminated in less than four hours. It was tree-mendously sad.

It was not my tree, not in my yard, and yet it was mine and yours because trees are for all of us to enjoy. Trees are one of nature’s Hallmark cards — an ironic thought since some trees literally become greeting cards. Or, more irony here, newsprint.

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 see out my kitchen window looking east, the sun rising above it in the late spring mornings.

The melancholy event gave me pause to think about a handful of memorable trees in my life: The evergreen beside the driveway of my first boyhood home that my two older brothers and I attempted blind shots over during games of H-O-R-S-E. The sturdy buckeye near a swimming hole that we swung from on a rope. The apple tree I picked snacks off on a shortcut home from 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 all our lives more than we generally realize. We draw trees in kindergarten and climb trees as older kids and hopefully at least once plant a tree, for as the Greek proverb states: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”

Kilmer once more:

Afterward, this columnist fool walked over to determine how old the tree had been by counting its rings, but the stump was cut off below the ground and covered with dirt.

I may be overestimating by half, but I like to think this tree had sprouted in 1913, the same year as “Trees” came into being.