Illumination Writing Challenge
How Do You Measure the Worth of a Tree?
It may knot be what you think
Published in
5 min readJul 17, 2020
“I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.” — Joyce Kilmer
Somewhere in my battered memory bank is the quote, “I think that I shall never see a smokestack as lovely as a tree.” But after a moderately vigorous search on Google, all I could come up with is Joyce Kilmer’s first lines of his famous poem, Trees, written in 1913.
In the Wikipedia reference above, mention is made of several parodies, including Ogden Nash’s uses billboards as a contrast to the tree. Perhaps that is what I am thinking of, maybe not.
I suppose it is irrelevant in this forum as all I wish to talk about is the tree. Specifically, the tree Charles Roast took a picture of and wrote this poem about:
The photo in question is here:
