Preserving my beloved oak tree on campus. The four-foot-tall fences and signs marking its impending demise motivated me to take action. I turned to literature with images for comfort because I could not express my emotions through photographs alone. Mark Haddoni’s “Trees” resonated with me, evoking a profound reverence for these majestic beings. I meticulously inscribed lines from Haddoni’s poem onto each tree branch and repeated them several times. The process was long and tedious, requiring patience and precision, but ultimately enjoyable. Adorning the tree with poetic verses, I felt a profound connection to nature and a deep-seated determination to honor its memory.
Trees
BY MARK HADDON
They stand in parks and graveyards and gardens.
Some of them are taller than department stores,
yet they do not draw attention to themselves.
You will be fitting a heated towel rail one day
and see, through the louvre window,
a shoal of olive-green fish changing direction
in the air that swims above the little gardens.
Or you will wake at your aunt’s cottage,
your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill
as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel.
Your kindness to animals, your skill at the clarinet,
these are accidental things.
We lost this game a long way back.
Look at you. You’re reading poetry.
Outside the spring air is thick
with the seeds of their children.
Mark Haddon, “Trees” from The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. Copyright © 2005 by Mark Haddon.
