Читать книгу The Heronry - Mark Jarman - Страница 11

Eocene Beech Leaf

This ghost filled in with stone for flesh,

with spine and delicate ribs legible

and a fragment of the fragile blade chipped off,

this leaf imprinted on a page of shale,

all the more tender for its injury,

for forty million years has held its place.

Startling in a way to see so far back—

as if we’d found between leaves of a book

a picture of ourselves from much younger days

and remembered nearly everything about it

except just why we’d put it there.