"Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and me

I wasn’t always a writer of prose. There was a short time a very long time ago when I wrote poetry—damn good poetry.

I was reading a book about the Appalachians, which had a chapter about the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest—the only never-logged woodland in all of Appalachia. The naming of this choice natural treasure was obviously inspired by Kilmer’s famous poem, “Trees.”

Reading the story of the forest, Kilmer and the poem reminded me of an incident that happened more than 50 years ago when I was in the third grade at Abraham Lincoln School in Irondequoit, New York.

Our teacher assigned us the task of writing a poem. Now I didn’t know where to begin and I guess I really wasn’t that interested in beginning. So I put it off and put it off until finally I was right up to the day of reckoning and had nothing to show for it.

I had to find a poem somewhere. Lucky for me, I thought, we had in the house one of my father’s old school books—an anthology of poems and short stories. What I remembered most about the book was that it was edited by a Rochester high school teacher and published by the school district. I have always found the idea very appealing that some of the teachers might actually have been my father’s teachers.

The other thing I remembered about the book was that it had some poems in it—one in particular—that seemed to be pretty simple-minded, or to put it another way, a poem that I could have written or to put it in yet another way a poem that I could say I wrote.

The poem, “Trees,” was written by Joyce Kilmer, a woman I had never heard of and assumed no one else had ever heard of.

So I wrote out in long hand, what I remember thinking at the time was something well within my talent range, the quaint little lines—I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree…

The next day, I turned my poem in, reasonably sure that unless my teacher had the same book at home, which I knew was highly unlikely because it was just a local collection of poetry and such, that no one would ever guess that I had stolen my original poem from Joyce Kilmer.

Well, to make a long story short, if I haven’t already made a short story too long, my secret was about to see the light of day.

To introduce the lesson, our teacher decided to read a poem that she said would appear on the surface to be very simplistic but that she assured us, conveyed many complex thoughts and emotions.

As she read the poem entitled, “Trees,” I couldn’t help thinking, “I had no idea.” And I didn’t. I actually still thought she was reading my poem—or at least the poem I claimed was mine.

When she was done and told the class that the author of the poem was a man—a man?—named Joyce Kilmer, I knew that I was in big trouble. Except I wasn’t. I guess I was a classic case of someone more to be pitied than scolded.

In essence, she told me privately that I had made a colossal mistake but that I was probably not the first person to read that poem and think any kid could have written it. She said I still owed her a poem but that would be the end of it—although it wasn’t my imagination that there was a lot of laughter going on at the teacher’s table that day at lunchtime.

Since reading this latest book I now know some more about Joyce Kilmer that I didn’t know before. Not only was he a man but he was also a very heroic man.

After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1917, he quit his job at the New York Times and enlisted in the National Guard. He then rejected safe jobs that being the well-known literary figure would have been his for the asking. Instead, he found himself on the frontlines in France where he was killed by a sniper’s bullet.

In the course of relating this story I have come to realize one more thing. While the story is true and the facts are accurate as I remember them, it seems to me now that this event could not have taken place in the third grade, as I still believe them to have been. It just doesn’t seem plausible that we were studying poetry then or that I was reading my father’s anthology of American verse in my spare time.

I think it could have possibly happened in the fifth grade when Mr. Mooney was my teacher and we students might have more likely been assigned to write a poem. I know it didn’t happen in 7th or 8th grade because I was being taught by nuns then and not only was what I had done plagiarism but it was also a sin and there most certainly would have been hell to pay.

That leaves only the possibility that it happened in high school where I would have been most likely to receive that assignment, failed to do that assignment, and tried to plagiarize my way out of that assignment. But I think that the punishment would have been more severe at that level—severe enough that there would not be any confusion about when it all took place.

In the fifth grade at the age of ten, my transgression would have been most likely blamed on youthful ignorance, innocent mischief and just plain too-dumb-to-know-any-better, making this more of a humorous story than a saga about how could I do something this stupid to a beloved poet and true war-time hero.

So I think that I can safely say that the poem read on that fateful day was written in my fifth grade class by a lad and not a lass.