Every Tree Should Get A Poem

[ChristopherSea]

Nostalgia never felt more bittersweet when
the old red oak tree by the north river pond had snapped
in half by the storm, like his spine was made of rubber.
Driving past the fields of childhood memories,
it's like someone killed the local pastor.

Limp and bowed over, the rope swing dipped in water.
His branches no longer constricted high
and mighty, but drooped down to eye level.
No more fresh sap can he deliver, just sheltering an old honey hive,
that the rain could not wash over,
and children were climbing his lifeless
trunk, ripping out the only twigs left on his withered
arms, and hauling them at each other.

With empathy I pulled over to get a look at what
mother nature undertook. Giving birth to a seedling,
only to watch it come crashing down.
Never did I question his strength
as I would swing on his dark, husky branches, jumping in greenery
to drown.

Does he remember the sweat I soaked into his bole, when I pedaled so hard
from school, being chased by a battalion of girls using rocks as grenades.
I hid, and he hid me in his regal position
vines wrapping around my hurt, cradling me still.

No longer can he change colors to match the skylines.
The old oak tree will be taken in by the city to be,
chopped, sawed and glued.
Maybe to be the next headline warning
to take cover,
when a storm is coming through.

I completely agree with your thesis expounded in the title of the piece and I have done so many times myself, i.e., preserved trees in poetry and in my life as a member of the National Arbor Day Society.

As for the poem, you should strike that first line and get right into the pulp of the poem. I would replace rubber with something like glass. You have the antithesis of what you need. With oak being a hardwood, snapping like it was balsam would also be effective. In the next stanza, limp and bent over should be the tree or a limb and not the rope swing. Why the language inversion here: 'No more fresh sap can he deliver'. It reads oddly, 'He can no longer deliver sap' would suffice.

As I read along, there are a lot of images and events tacked together, but I think you need to organize and unfurl them better. In your close, you should add 'pulped' to your list in order to better connect the tree to that head line. Good ideas and images herein, but the execution needs to be better. Organize the stanzas, strive for brevity of word, clean up the run-on sentences, correct typos, use more effective punctuation, etc. Take your time with each line. Good luck with it my fellow tree-hugger./Chris