Yesterday in my senior sem class (it’s called Imagining the Earth, remember) my professor told us to get up, put our coats on, and head outside. Our task? To look at a tree. We were told to examine the tree, write about what we saw, ask questions about the tree. Really try to understand the tree.
After exchanging a few glances with my fellow classmates (oh, dear god, what have we ourselves gotten into?), we readily complied and headed outside for a little while. It was a gorgeous day, the sun was shining, and the trees were at our service. I picked an extremely tall tree–basically, the tallest one in the vicinity–and commenced to jotting down what became a handful of lines about it.
When I was finished, I realized my descriptions of the tree sounded rather poetic. It certainly is no poem and I do not claim to write poetry, but I thought I’d share it with you all:
This tree is rather large and
Round it is really tall
way taller than I am
It kind of looks like
A really long torso got stuck in
the ground with a lot
of some legs that have
been shredded into lots of
long pieces sticking out from it.
So gruesome, right?
It’s really straight and whole
and in one piece and then it branches
off into confusion
It gets more complex as it
grows. Kind of like humans…
Around most of the tree there is a
yellow substance. I don’t know what it is
Then, for about a fourth of it, it’s gone.
Yeah, so it’s a little confusing and doesn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense at some parts. But ya know, it was a stream of word vomit for an assignment so it doesn’t have to make sense.
Who knows what senior sem ramblings I’ll have to share in the future. It seems like I’ve taken on this new, contemplatively whimsical persona for every single piece I’ve written for this class so far (which has only been like, two) and it just feels so weird. It’s not like it’s not me writing or anything, it’s just a part of me I didn’t know was there.
Maybe I’m just not in tune enough with nature.
Yeah, I’m probably not.
It's a Britta Bottle! 
Your “notes” sound a lot like a poem. It’s amazing! And don’t worry, it does make sense. Oh, the things we would write if only we took the time to notice our surroundings.
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Thank you! I’ve never considered myself a poet, so I was quite surprised when I read through my notes and noticed they did sound sort of like a poem. Perhaps I could be more of a poet if I paid better attention to my surroundings on a regular basis! 🙂
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I was reading that if we forced ourselves to slow down and start noticing things we hadn’t noticed before, we would have enough subject matter to start writing poetry.
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Hey, Britta! I agree guevaragem that your notes looks like a poem. I just jotted down bullet points, so that I wouldn’t have to write in great big paragraphs. In any case, my version looks less poetic and more like a list.
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Thanks for the feedback, Meghan. I definitely wouldn’t call my notes a poem since that certainly wasn’t my intention. I’m glad other people like it, though, especially since it is just a compilation of my random musings from Thursday’s class period. 🙂
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