[see; that last lovely tree]

K Roberts used words from “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer (1913) to create a shaped poem. Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, K Roberts writes:

Kilmer speaks about his appreciation of nature’s beauty. In my response to Kilmer’s poem, I wanted to acknowledge the problems of environmental damage and our loss of connection to nature. The concept I began with was to create a shape poem, a visual presentation that would support the theme. Word-cloud mapping software was useful during the early drafts. The software poured a copy of Kilmer’s text into a design outline, filling the tree shape with letters the way water fills a vase. Program settings made it possible to weight the priority of words and change font sizes. These choices caused groupings to shift, as the words swirled inside the outline. When meaningful fragments emerged, these were typed into MS Word and edited into stanzas. The final version is a wire frame; the vase has been emptied of its water, and the poem is a silhouette of an absent tree. Adding dots as stanza spacers was the finishing step. The dots imply the dying tree’s falling leaves, its last season of bearing fruit.