Before
Earth Day, Arbor Day was
the primary environmental celebration and
semi-holiday in the United States. And for a while it was a very big deal with tens of thousands
of volunteers across the
country planting and tending trees. The results
were breath taking.
Arbor
Day is often credited with re-foresting
American cities and towns. Old 19th
Century photographs reveal that many were barren urban wastelands long denuded
foliage with buildings jammed
together and coming right up to streets
and crude sidewalks. In Chicago,
for instance, Daniel Burnham’s
famous network of
grand boulevards which radiated from the downtown core piercing
the neighborhoods with trees was influenced by the Arbor Day movement. Later the smaller boulevards—the local name
for the strip of ground between the sidewalk and the street—were planted with trees, many
by the CCC during the Great Depression. Not only did all of those trees greatly improve the look of the city, they helped dramatically clean the air and provided much needed shade that helped cool city
folk through sweltering summers. Some sociologists
even noted a reduction in crime in
neighborhoods with trees.
Tree planting festivals have been traced
by to the Spanish village of Villanueva
de la Sierra in 1805 where a local Priest
organized a three day fiesta around planting hundreds of trees. The custom spread to neighboring villages and
towns.
In America Arbor Day was founded
in 1872 by Democratic politician and later Secretary
of
Agriculture Julius Sterling Morton
at Nebraska City, Nebraska. That
first year 10,000 trees were planted in and around the community. Anyone who has ever visited Nebraska can
attest to the crying need for trees on its vast High Plains. Morton’s son, Joy Morton, the founder of the Morton
Salt Company in Chicago, shared his father’s enthusiasm and founded the Morton Arboretum in suburban Lyle centered on the grounds of his estate.
An Arbor Day tree planting in 1887. Looks to be on the grounds of a High Plains school.
The first observance drew national attention and
soon other towns were emulating it. By
1883 the American Forestry Association officially endorsed Arbor Day and
named Birdseye Northrop of Connecticut as Chairman of a committee to make the day an official national celebration. Birdseye, who liked to travel, also
introduced the idea to Japan,
Australia, Canada, and back to Europe.
In
1907 President Theodore Roosevelt issued
an Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of the United States. It became an annual tradition. Eventually
Congress designated the final Friday of April for the
observance and several states made
it a holiday.
In
the early years the Boy Scouts were heavily mobilized for tree planting and
many troops continue that tradition. As observed, the CCC and the WPA in conjunction with the National Forest Service were
employed during the Depression.
Tree
plantings continue, but the spotlight
seldom shines on Arbor Day anymore.
But
we can celebrate with poetry,
naturally. Poets probably have been versifying about trees since the first bard plucked his lyre. Yet most of us can
only recall Joyce Kilmer’s
Trees.
With apologies to Kilmer who was killed in the trenches of World War I just as his hymn
to trees was becoming famous. It is
a pretty bad poem filled with mixed and conflicting metaphors. We
can do better.
Alan Keitt is a poet with a special interest in the intersection of spirituality
and ecology. This poem and other work appeared in Gatherings: Seeking Ecopsychology,
an on-line journal published in the early years of the current century.
A venrable live oak.
The Live Oak Chronicles
You
came a volunteer
when
the fires no longer scourged the wiregrass
and
chased old gopher turtle down his hole
You
saw it didn’t you—
The
felling of the longleaf pines for the field
a
hundred years ago
You
heard the lathering mule grunt
as
the straight plow hung on the grandaddy rock
You
felt it didn’t you—
as
they ringed your roots
with
the rocky spawn of the field
You
saw the rough stone pilings
and
the raw cypress boards and battens
You
saw it when the rusty roof was shiny new
and
the Pecan trees were full of nuts
You
heard it, didn’t you—
when
the singing stopped and the prayers began
and
all the laughter and the tears
You
saw them leave
following
mama's body
down
the old mail road
for
the last time
You
saw us too—didn’t you
digging
lighter stumps
to
free the buried sunlight
of
two centuries
in
my stove
But
at the center of your triune trunk
there
came a moldering,
only
a crack at first
One
night, alone
with
the abandoned house
and
the fields fallow
your
mossy beard
began
to stream eastward
Was
it a roiling front that came
or
the summer's anvil cloud
You
leaned with it
as
a thousand times before
and
just never came back up
Soon
the last of your Siamese siblings
split
off balance and wounded at the core
will
lean its way one last time
And
from the new light
above
the ruin
of
your descended majesty
the
birds will come
as
jewels for your shroud.
—Alan Keitt
Naomi
Shihab Nye is an American, an Arab, a
poet, a parent, and a woman of Texas. She is the daughter of a Palestinian
father and an American mother and lived in Jerusalem, in St. Louis,
and now with her own family in San
Antonio, Texas.
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Palestinian Fig tree.
My Father and
the Fig Tree
For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
“See those? I wish they were figs.”
In the evening he sat by my beds
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he'd stick it in.
Once Joha1 was walking down the road and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him, his pockets were full of figs.
At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about!” he said,
“I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth—
gift of Allah!—on a branch so heavy it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)
Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had figtrees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is. Look how many things he starts and doesn’t finish.”
The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a fig tree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.
1A trickster figure in Palestinian folktales
–Naomi Shihab Nye
Weeping Willow by Claude Monet
Kathleen Lohr is a Los
Angeles based poet and screenwriter
whose work has appeared in local
and regional literary magazines
including The Moment, Red Dancefloor Press, For
the Lives of Us, Dance of the
Iguana, Blue Satellite, 50%, Poetry Motel, Shelia
na Gig, and Chiron Review.
The Weeping Tree
When the wild mouths
of first love promise
the willow listens.
The earth tastes of silence
and grey swings creak
on butter-soft porches
phrases sway
then fall like feathers
and the willow listens.
While babies smell of jazz
their cries like small mice
in the jasmine silvered nights
and the lights surrounded by moths
whose wings flutter
uncertain on the edges of black
the willow listens.
Inside bricked rooms
when grampa lays
aside his coffee spoon
because the moon is made
of blue cheese
not green
the willow listens.
Sides are chosen
no matter which
it’s the spirit of the thing
and still the willow
with its branches bent
the tips brushing the grass
like loving brooms
listens, listens.
As time is laid aside
like pine cones
that roll on empty roofs
over evening shutters
or morning lace
when the children say
see, see the willow tree
the willow still listens
and weeps.
—Kathleen Lohr
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace illustration by the author.
We will end with that counter-cultural
mystic Richard Brautigan who decades
ago had this vision.
All
Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
—Richard Brautigan
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