FAMILY TREE

This simple poem, "Trees Are Tropes for Marriage ," was very well received, yesterday, at our youngest son's wedding in Kansas City, Mo. Kemet Dumas Coleman had urged me to write it, in keeping with the motif .of he and Lauren's (Huston) nuptial. I wrote the poem's top part and ended it with Joyce Kilmer's iconic poem, "Tree;" as the "something old," to accompany this poem's "something new," itself long idiomatic of weddings. It was a labor of love for me to write, and a profound joy for me to read at that auspicious event in our families' history. --- "Trees are tropes for marriage" Trees, as tropes, are marvelous natural metaphors for marriage; symbolizing community, nativity, probity, vitality, constancy, fertility, resiliency, majesty, fecundity, glory, history, divinity, perpetuity, and truth. Yet, Joyce Kilmer says it best: "I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in Summer wear A nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree."