Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

The image treats trees as a kind of natural literature—“poems” written by the earth and displayed in the sky—suggesting that the living world already bears meaning and beauty without human mediation. The second movement reverses that reverence: humans cut those “poems” down and convert them into paper, a material for writing. The final clause, “record our emptiness,” turns the act into an indictment of vanity and spiritual lack: we destroy a profound, living text in order to manufacture surfaces on which to inscribe triviality, self-importance, or hollow records. The quote thus fuses ecological critique with a moral-spiritual warning about substituting dead symbols for living presence.