“360” by Wendy BooydeGraaff
I’m walking down the sidewalk in my neighbourhood, the way I do every day & sometimes twice whenever the weather is decent, which is to say whenever it’s above 50 degrees in Kentwood & the world is worth walking twice & I see a tree with a yellow caution tape belt & behind me is the rumble of the tree service truck & the engine is still on, farting diesel into the atmosphere, while I round the corner & hear the chainsaws fire up & now there’s several diesel motors putt-putting fumes into the air we breathe & normally the trees are the ones cleaning that up for us but it seems as if the trees & humans are at war & trees, being the strong silent type, are nonviolent in protest while humans rant & charge ahead with their machine-gun-saws & down this street people are admiring the double-wide pickup truck, newly purchased, showing off some sort of ruggedness no one really needs here in the suburbs & I walk faster & the air is springing & the time’s about to change & that means we are saving daylight or something that sounds like we’re affecting the world somehow positively except really it increases accidents & jetlag without even travelling & I round another corner & someone stuck all their nasty lawn flags touting the narcissistic conspiracy fake news guy right next to the property line of the home of the largest Black Lives Matter flag & I wonder how people can be smart enough to win over trees because it seems like the same people who don’t care about trees don’t care about people & it makes the side I’m on heavy with the burdens that the other side annihilates with guns & chainsaws & I round another corner & here’s the park & here’s a big sign on wooden legs & upon inspection I see the plan & yellow-vested teenagers are already spreading seeds around the furrowed perimeter for the butterfly meadow & a flatbed full of saplings is unloading onto the pathway & my lungs expand with fresher air & I decide I can walk three times around the loop today & maybe if we don’t change our minds, in 50 years we’ll have 50 trees nearly as big as that one that I can still hear going down today.
Artist Statement
I write poems to record the world, to ask questions, to communicate, to open dialogue. This particular poem is circular: in construction (a single long sentence wrapping around the line breaks), in daily routines and routes (walking a circle around the park), in life cycles (of trees, lawns, people, movements), in ruminations (on politics, human impact), in the patterns of suburban tree removal and planting. I’m interested in structure and form, and how content works within form to emphasize its message.
Wendy BooydeGraaff’s poems have appeared in Afterimages, The Elevation Review, Litmosphere, and Novus Literary Arts Journal, and are anthologized in Under Her Eye (Blackspot Books), Not Very Quiet (Recent Works Press), and Midwest Futures: Poems & Micro-Stories from Tomorrow's Heartland (Middle West Press). “Molasses” was her first contribution to MicroLit. Read more at wendybooydegraaff.com.