“If you go to a desert, you will hear this mysterious voice: Be wise, protect your forests!”
- Mehmet Murat ildan
Apart from the bad rap in Julius Caesar, the month of March has so much to offer. You can be mad as a March hare, you can march off somewhere or you can steal a march. Lord knows, marches have accomplished so much - as a military strategy and as a call to arms.
The month is also filled with all sorts of celebrations. A friend told me about the International Day of Forests, celebrated on March 21st each year. The event is meant to create awareness about the essential requirement of every type of forest and to reinforce the message of conservation. Symposiums, hug-a-tree- events, debates and conferences will mark the date. And hopefully, many concrete steps.
Come to think of it, how can one not be aware of the importance of trees? And yet, living in Coimbatore, I have seen the beautiful lush green cover disappear from not one or two or three, but four important roads. I am sure you have too. And this is not counting the by-lanes and the smaller streets. It is a shame that we cut down with impunity, all in the name of development and progress.
For who can forget the immortal lines in William Blake’s classic, The Tyger, “Tyger Tyger, burning bright/ In the forests of the night/What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Ironically, it’s the tiger, along with so many animals and birds under threat, which lives in fear, assaulted by population, insensitivity and sheer idiocy.
But there is goodness too. I am charmed by the simple beauty of the somewhat lenthy-ly titled, On First Seeing a U.S. Forest Service Aerial Photo of Where I Live. James Galvin says that his initial assertions of living in the sky are wrong. He lives, “on a needle of a branch/Of a cedar tree, hard-bitten/ Striving in six directions/ Rooted in rock, a cedar/ Tree made of other trees/ Not cedar but fir/Lodgepole, and blue spruce…” Lodgepole, I have subsequently learnt, is a type of pine tree.
Perhaps Howard Nemerov has the right idea in Learning the Trees. It’s a delightful poem, connecting trees and words. It starts off in a rather mundane fashion – to know about trees, learn about them, from a book. “The words themselves are a delight to learn/ You might be in a foreign land of terms/Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome/Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth. But best of all are the words that shape the leaves—/Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform—/And their venation—palmate and parallel—/And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate.”
Thus prepared, the reader needs to venture out into the world and find ‘catalogue and category’ in the chaos. But then the reader is confused. The book blandly says, “an average leaf,” yet leaves of the same tree, differ dramatically from each other. Now what!? Nonetheless, “Little by little, you do start to learn; /And learn as well, maybe, what language does/And how it does it...” It’s the sound of all the unusual words that draws me to the poem. Like the reader, I too, learn of trees from words, and from wood.
Thank you, Naveen, for urging me to write about the day. Even if we march to a different drummer, may we all always see the joy of forests and the abundance of life they contain, nurture and sustain.
Srividya is a poet. Read her work at >www.rumwrapt.blogspot.com
