Disaster!

Sometime between Friday morning 10/31 and Monday morning 11/3 the entire contents of the Poetry Tree disappeared.  Several explanations present themselves as possibilities.  It was a very windy, snowy, weekend, so perhaps the laminated sheets and the poems in plastic sleeves were blown away.  It’s also possible that the Commonwealth’s Department of Conservation and Recreation decided that the tree should not serve as a bulletin board for poetry.  A third possibility is that the same individual who tore down the first poems posted in 2012 has returned and has once again stripped the tree of its poetry.  I believe that the most likely explanation is the third and regret that the individual who so acted was not willing to enter into a dialogue about his/her feelings about the tree or poetry rather than unilaterally removing poems which were daily enjoyed by dozens of walkers, runners, bikers, etc.  The Poetry Tree will return later this week with renewed hope that it will survive.

4 responses

  1. What a pity! I thought maybe you had taken them down to provide more space for other poems. I’ll put up another one tomorrow.

    • Thanks, Anne. I hope that you will continue to post poems. The second set I put up have also disappeared, but I’m leaning towards blaming it on the wind and weather. Someone has posted a new poem, so I’m about to get back into the Poetry Tree. All submissions are welcome.

  2. I pass the tree every Sunday when I stretch out my run by an additional bridge. I had just gotten around to typing up and suitably insulating my chosen poem when the poems disappeared. The semi-reassuring news is that judging from the bagged leaves and branches, not to mention the fresh saw marks, I think it is safe to assume that it was not the act of a serial poemophobe, but rather the somewhat more understandable result of city workers’ misguided efforts.

    • Thanks for your comments. Since the second set of poems that I posted has also disappeared, but one at a time, I am chalking up the disappearances to the winds and elements. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the DCR since they had pruned the tree a couple of weeks before the first disappearance without touching the poems. I’m about to post another set, so we’ll see if more robust methods of attaching them to the tree make a difference.

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