Branching Out with Words: How One Woman’s ‘Poet-Tree’ is Building Meaningful Connections

One day while on vacation in the seaside town of Cape May, New Jersey, Heidi McCracken, an elementary school teacher from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was driving her family to dinner when her kids squealed, “Mom, stop! Look at that tree!”

In front of a brown cottage with neat white trim stood a miniature weeping cherry tree with sheets of bright-colored paper hanging from its branches. Heidi and her kids jumped out of the car to take a closer look and found a poem written on each piece of paper, connected to a branch with a piece of string and a tiny wooden clothespin. A handwritten sign staked into the ground read “Poet-Tree.” Another sign invited passers-by to take a poem from the tree.

“It was such a wonderful thing to see. My kids each took a poem and so did I,” McCracken said. “When I got back to my classroom, I brought the idea of the Poet-Tree to my students. They found poems they liked and made them into ornaments to hang on our own Poet-Tree, an artificial one we set up for the holidays,” she said.

Sylvia Baer, the creator of the Poet-Tree, got the idea for the tree back in 2016 when she says she saw the country becoming so divided in such an intense and gut-wrenching way. “I woke up one morning thinking, I'm just one person. What on earth can I possibly do that's going to make any kind of difference?” she said. “I have no major voice or skill or talent. I'm just one person here. And then I sort of sat up and I said, ‘Wait a minute. The thing I can do is what I know how to do. And that is to use poetry to bring people together.’”

A poet and professor emeritus at Rowan College, Baer has been an educator for more than 50 years. Words and poetry have inspired her since she was a girl growing up in Uruguay, where her grandparents settled after they escaped the Holocaust. Baer and her grandfather had a habit of writing together every Sunday after dinner. For her seventh birthday, he wrote her a poem that was in both Spanish and English, which she hadn’t learned yet. “English is the language of your future,” Baer remembers her grandfather telling her, adding, “but the beauty and power of words to make us remember to love the world – the whole entire world – is the past, present, and future universal language of hope.”

That idea stuck with Baer. She moved to the U.S. in 1957, where her love of words helped her earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in English, becoming an expert in 19th-century American literature and world poetry. 

So on that day back in 2016, Baer looked out her window at the cherry tree in her front yard in Cape May and realized it was the perfect place for her idea to take root and bloom.

“I like to play with words. I giggled at the thought of the word ‘poet’ then a dash then ‘tree.’  Like, oh, this could be a Poet-Tree, “Baer said.

The poems – about 60 at a time – are up from July through August and get replenished twice daily. There are works from Robert Frost, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda and more. Poems for kids, all written by Baer, are printed on bright-yellow paper so they’re easy to pick out.

One day her husband, John, who helps print out the poems and makes  the handwritten signs, called her to the window. A group of teenage boys with skateboards under their arms looking like they just came from the beach were reading poems. Then they each picked one, folded the paper up and rolled away. “If that can happen in July in a small town in New Jersey with boys stopping to read poetry, yeah, the world's going to be okay,” Baer said.

Another day Baer saw a woman taking pictures of the tree with tears streaming down her face. Her name was Olga and she was from Poland. “I read these poems,” she said, “and I think people all over the world, we really are the same.”

Librarians across the country have contacted Baer to share that they too created Poet-Trees of their own in their libraries. She’s heard the same from folks as far away as Norway. “It is so meaningful to see this whole chain reaction,” Baer said. “People will find it meaningful in their way and take it another step beyond that.”

Esther Ritrovato, a retired cardiac sonographer, walked by the tree  and was intrigued. “I took a poem I liked and you’d think someone had given me a twenty-dollar bill.” She calls the Poet-Tree magical. “I’m right-brained and have seen people’s hearts in a scientific way. Sylvia sees into people’s hearts in a different way. But we all need to read something that’s beautiful and thoughtful.”

When Cape May’s Mayor Zachary Mullock visited the Poet-Tree with his three kids, he was enthralled by their joyful reaction. “They asked me if the poems actually grew from the tree. I went with it and told them, ‘It’s the Poet-Tree. It’s magic,” he said. They go back to the Poet-Tree every summer to get more poems.They keep them, memorize them and recite them, he said.

Mullock was so inspired by Baer, he named her the poet laureate of Cape May in 2022. Her duties include writing poems for holidays and special occasions around town, including the July 4 parade. During the outings, Baer wears a homemade sash that says Poet Laureate. At the bottom of the sash is a gold pin in the shape of a bird. That same  pin was inside the seam of her grandmother's coat when she escaped from Poland; it used to belong to Baer’s grandmother’s aunt who was killed on a train to a concentration camp.

“I had to put it on my sash because I bring my past with me into the present and the future,” Baer said. “I pinned this bird, a humble and beautiful symbol of hope for a future with dignity and love for the whole family of humankind, to my sash. I wear it proudly.”

At the July 4 parade, most of the participants hand out candy to the crowd. Baer hands out poems. “Kids are yelling, ‘It’s the Poet-Tree Lady,’” said William C. King, who drives the convertible Baer rides in. “They are swarming the car to get her poems. Forget the candy, they want the poems.”

Baer said she loves the positivity around the poems and the tree. She has seen firsthand how poetry can inspire people from all walks of life. “There are people who I know are from all political angles who will stand around the tree together, not knowing that they're vastly different politically, and they'll talk about the poems,” she said. “People of a completely different political bent, completely different religious bent, completely different everything. And yet, not really.”

Editor’s Note: Sylvia Baer’s new book, “Building Life: A Memoir,” has just been released and is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Celeste McCauley is a writer and editor based in New York.