I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
(TREES BY JOYCE KILMER)
In high school, my music teacher pounded on the piano every week during our music lesson. All of us belted out the song. She played beautifully and sang even more beautifully. She must have loved that song and poem very much because she played it every week. I don’t remember anything else we did in her class. And we loved belting it out every week with her.
Many years later, I have immigrated to America, thousands of miles from where I first sang but never understood that song. One day, the song came back to me. My marriage was breaking up. I was in total turmoil, walking down the parking lot of a Walmart Super Center, asking myself how I was going to survive. Then something came over me and said, “look at the tall trees all around you in the parking lot. Send your roots deep down into the earth. Raise your arms high into the heavens. The trees are sustained like this. You can be sustained too.”
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
It has been 12 years since that day in the parking lot. I am still here, going through all of life’s joys and sorrows…going through what a tree goes through, wearing maybe a robin’s nest in the summer, or embracing the snow in cold winter. Life has been a journey of learning how to lift my leafy arms to pray, looking at God every time I see a tree.
Enjoy the entire poem HERE.