I enjoy many kinds of poetry, though my tastes lean toward the commonly-known and commonly-admired poets. Robert Frost. Emily Dickinson. Walt Whitman. Mary Oliver. Maya Angelou (whose reading—lucky me!—I was able to attend when she visited Tennessee Tech several years ago). I love pretty much every word Wendell Berry has ever written, including his poetry. And I’m only partially joking when I say Ernest Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” is one of my favorite poems of all time.
When it comes to Shakespeare, I suppose I deserve credit for memorizing a few of his most commonly repeated poetic lines: “Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble” (MacBeth), “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (Romeo and Juliet) and “Et tu, Brute?” (Julius Caesar).
I hang out with a lot of creative writer friends. Many of them, most in fact, are poets. Their talent blows me away. Even those who write novels and short stories and essays—and, yes, even newspaper columns—also write poetry.
Not me, though. I lack the background. I lack the knowledge. Most of all, I lack the skills. No poem I’ve ever entered in a writing contest has won even an honorable mention. I once wrote a poem entitled “I Hate Peas,” which I’m sure the judges laughed and laughed about. But I had the last laugh. Because my Herald-Citizen editors allow me to write about anything I want, from politics to book reviews to childhood memories to—yes!—poetry, I published that poem in this column many years ago.
Just last week I had an epiphany. In moving into my new-to-me house, I discovered that lots of “improvements” needed to be made. One of the improvements involved cutting down a dying maple tree in my front yard. I hated to do it, but tree experts assured me it was diseased and needed to go before it crashed onto my house. So a tree cutter came with his bucket truck and dump truck and chain saws and ropes and rakes and all the other equipment tree cutters need. He spent almost an entire day taking the tree down.
And as I spent a good part of the day watching him do it, I knew I wanted to write about it. But instead of prose, could I put my observations in verse? You, dear reader, are hereby invited to judge my efforts. Here’s the poem.
THE TREE CUTTER
The man who cut down the dying maple
and left a giant stump in my front yard,
two feet high and as level as a chain saw could slice it
(as I’d asked him to do so I could set a pot of marigolds upon it)
suggested I not put the pot in place just yet.
There’s a baby squirrel on the stump, he said
Must have fell out of the nest when the tree fell
Poor little thing’s in sorry shape
I’ll finish him off if you want.
When I shook my head
the tree cutter smiled with his eyes.
If we leave it, he said,
the mama might come back
but if she don’t, the birds will make quick work of it.
As always, thanks for reading my newspaper column. And my poetry.
(March 28, 2026)