Michael Simms

Some months ago, I tried to write a poem about a man sitting on a platform in a tree early in the morning. From where he was sitting, he could look over the tops of the giant evergreens to the edge of the encroaching city. Below him, loggers were arriving with their deadly chain saws, and he could hear the bulldozers being unloaded from the backs of large rigs. The loggers wore red t-shirts with the logo of the paper company who’d hired them to harvest the trees. In my poem, the tree-sitter is heroic in his tenacity, and I compare him to other radical activists I admire: the Raging Grannies knitting in their rocking chairs, blocking trucks carrying drilling equipment; the four young women found guilty of criminal trespass for putting jugs of water in the desert where migrants cross our southern border; and the Catonsville Nine breaking into a government office to burn draft records in 1968 and going to prison for their crime. As John Lewis instructs us, we must “Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.” The temptation for the poet is to adapt these heroic stories, put them to music, so to speak. This would make a great poem, the poet thinks. However, the brave tenacity of a peaceful warrior, sitting in a tree for weeks, months, perhaps years, dwarfs any attempt to praise him. Finally, I decided the best way to celebrate a tree-sitter’s sacrifice, and the sacrifice of so many other radical activists, was to recount unembellished fact. I carved my research notes down to a few representative examples and arranged the events chronologically. I present them here as history. No poem I can make is more impressive than the bare truth of these activists’ courage and commitment.