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A Tiny Irony: A Lost Story about Trees and Human Beings
Feb 18th, 2009 | Comments
Trees
By Joyce Kilmer
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
The trees in the picture:
These trees you see in the picture, lived along the coast of New Zealand. They were felled by a group of human beings who determined the trees were terribly diseased, rotted at the core, and therefore in danger of falling over and harming cars and drivers that might drive near them. So the trees were cut down. To keep humans safe.
A tiny irony: As you see in the pictures, the trees were living strong, the heartwood, which goes hollow in some trees, is not rotten. Instead, it is firm and lush and tightly-packed. The rot and disease claimed by those with faulty X-ray vision, was non-existent.
Another tiny irony: Along this particular highway over the last decade, over 240 persons have been killed or injured by driving into trees… that were not in the way, nor in the right-of-way, trees that did not fall over, trees that were not rotting or diseased, and which could neither walk nor run into the road, either.
The last word: Long ago, Mr. Alcott, back to home, used to sit out on his washcloth-sized porch on summer nights, and play his banjo or Tennessee slide guitar and sing the most bloody horrible ballads of drownings and union-busted heads, and lovers murdering lovers down at the river… At the end, he’d smile that gold tooth-missing toothed smile around his wet old cigarette and mutter, “Human beings, aint they wondrous.”
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CODA
The poet behind the poem: Joyce Kilmer was born 1886. This poem is in strict iambic pentameter which has the effect of forcing it into simple formalized lines. At the time of his death, Kilmer was considered a devotee of nature, and the leading American Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation. Critics often compared him to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
However, Kilmer’s work yet to come (many artists bring their most refined work during their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s) never arrived, for in the summer of 1918 he was sent to the Marne. There, in the second battle, he was killed by a sniper’s bullet. No one knows the name of the combatant who killed the poet, only that the poet was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French Republic in gratitude, that Kilmer was buried in an American cemetery on French soil, and that he was only 31 years old.
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Mike_P
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river
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GeorgeSorwell
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Ghostdreams
