October 12, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

Trees might save the world, but this essay is not about tempering climate change or hugging species. It is about calm. Calm most needed on the ever-noisy, dangerous orb where we try to live in peace. Most of us anyway.

Joyce Kilmer, a local guy (Suffern, N.Y.), before a sniper ended his life at 31 in the Second Battle of the Marne (1918), was a well-recognized poet particularly famous for his short poem “Trees.” It referenced the inability of art to replicate nature’s beauty.

It is ironic that a sensitive soul should leave this void in the No Man’s Land of scorched earth – trees reduced to skeletons. Two lines from “Trees” – “A tree that looks at God all day … And lifts her leafy arms to pray” – were black penciled that July as mankind unleashed yet more dark weaponry.

There is analogy from that battle time to present despair in parts of our cities and neglected rural areas where other guns fire, destroying young lives, including the innocent caught in crossfire.

In these neighborhoods, loss of jobs and hope morph into substance abuse, neglected mental and physical health, poverty and inadequate caring by the people’s government. Another No Man’s Land.

There are trees in the country, and even the gray of cities is challenged by greenery, but their offer of calm where the best decisions can be made for us humans is as rejected as it was in the Great War, any war, any assault on the living. Another line in “Trees”reads, “But only God can make a tree.” Done all the time, but we keep cutting down the achieving calm in the noise of neglect.

The writer is a retired newspaperman. (guntherart12@gmail.com).

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