Poetry Playing the Long Game

April 15, 2024

We scoot down the neighborhood streets on our annual pilgrimage to the massive cherry tree from which are, generously, strung three swings. Opposite, someone has thoughtfully placed a bench for parents to sit and enjoy the scene.

Every April these blossoms explode into magnificent pink pom poms, lush, fragile, effervescent. They are extravagant and short-lived, exploding from bare branches into pink fireworks overnight, and just as soon, falling like pink snow into gutter detritus. I want to dive into a pool of them, be swallowed whole in pink.

Across from the swing tree is another pink pom pom tree, this one, with a massive branch cracked downward, pom poms drooping over the sidewalk. For the part of me who is always gazing with awe at the beauty of others’ plants, wanting to surreptitiously snip a blossom (and trying hard to hold my hand at bay), this is paydirt. The pom pom motherlode. We gleefully tear off pom pom laden twigs to our hearts’ content, walking away with armfuls of pink bouquets just before the mulcher and tree trimmers pull in.

The bright orange mulcher blocks the street. Men go to work artfully finishing the job, sawing off broken limbs and other needful bits. A man on the ground shrouded in florescent yellow gathers the discarded branches by the pink armful and feeds them into the insatiable mouth of the machine. It whirls to life and the long puffed pink branches bob and bend, sucked in by the rotating blades, eventually swallowed whole. Delicate pink clusters drawn irreversibly in to the blades, strewing pink petals in thick piles on the street.

It is a horrifying sight. Like capitalism killing poetry, I joke with a dog-walking passerby.

But as I stand longer and watch the glorious branches consumed—the inverse of the burning bush—I see it in another light. The tree was beautiful, is beautiful still, but it was broken. It needed to let go of some part of itself, surrender some piece it had nurtured with care, but which could no longer serve. It needed to kill its darling.

When the tree men came with their saws and finished the job, released the injured limb, they made it possible for the rest of the tree to heal and thrive.

And when this beautiful thing is eaten whole by the machine, what happens? Does the beauty disappear?

No. It metamorphoses.

It carpets the road in pink petal piles, which we lift to the breeze and rain down on us, making us laugh hysterically.

Behind the metal mouth, the old broken branches are destroyed and then transformed, into wood chips, mulch which will soon nurture new life.

Nothing is wasted.

Sometimes we must surrender to death some part of us we have cared for tenderly, come to love, and rightfully cherish as precious, but which is no longer serving. Maybe it is injured and threatens the well-being of the whole. Maybe it is in the way of something new that would be born. Maybe we have simply grown out of it. But for whatever reason, and however beloved and beautiful it was in its season, it becomes, like the cracked branch thick with pink pom poms, something we must let fall away.

And sometimes we see, in the death of what was, even as we mourn the loss, the still, small birth of what will be. And it is not as terrible as we thought it might be. It is not only terrifying, though it looked that way at first. There may be a a flicker of new beauty being born. Maybe death is not the end of the story.

Maybe, after all, it’s poetry playing the long game.