“Poems are made by fools like me / but only God can make a tree.” In 1912, a young New Jersey–born poet named Joyce Kilmer sent a short poem, consisting of six couplets, to Harriet Moore, the editor of Poetry magazine. Monroe immediately accepted it, sending him payment of a dollar for each of those paired lines, and shortly thereafter published “Trees.” (The poem is quoted in full below.) On a tour of the Western Front six years later, a poet named Eloise Robinson recited several poems to the American soldiers fighting there, one of them being Kilmer’s verses on trees, which had since become famous. Kilmer, who was in the audience, bashfully allowed that he wrote the poem, earning applause from the surprised troops around him. He did not enjoy their appreciation long: A few weeks later, at the age of thirty-two, Sergeant Joyce Kilmer was felled by German machine gun fire, dying in France on July 30, 1918.
Since 1938, when the federal government purchased a grove slated for clear-cutting, Kilmer’s name has honored a small national forest preserve in North Carolina. And fittingly, for in many places in the South people remain in the old, charming habit of planting trees to honor significant life events and people important to them. In my grandparents’ front yard in Virginia, for instance, stood an oak planted to mark my mother’s birth, near other trees planted to commemorate the arrival of her four siblings. A dogwood went into the ground two decades later to note my birth. In my own Arizona garden now stand trees honoring my mother’s passing, as well as the deaths of friends and family. There is even a shady clump of mesquites under which I read poetry, thinking of the fallen and sometimes forgotten bards of the past, Joyce Kilmer among them.
Death, of course, is part of life. It may be more accurate to say that life is part of death, for trees as much as for people. But as I have been thinking about trees in writing this book, I have been thinking of death, for we live in a time when whole corners of the world we once knew are disappearing, in a time that has been ominously called the Sixth Extinction and less ominously, but still meaningfully, the Anthropocene—the age of humans, that is, with little room on the planet for anything that is other than Homo sapiens.
We live in a world of trees. The world’s supply of trees, indeed, is seemingly endless: There are today more than three trillion trees on the planet, more than eight times the estimated number just a decade ago. Still, that is less than half the number of trees that existed when our species first came onto the scene a few hundred thousand years ago. Since that time, we have been at war with the planet as a species. We have scored some recent victories on behalf of our home: For instance, just a couple of decades ago the Amazon rainforest was being clear-cut at the rate of an acre a minute, a rate that has slowed considerably in the time since. It has not stopped, however, and each year the people of Earth use 15 billion trees for such things as construction timber, firewood, paper plates, and toilet tissue.
Willerzell, Switzerland. Photograph by Gregory McNamee.
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