Michael Caines
Ebony Green
— After The archive of lost forests (2020)
A plank, a plinth.
A labelled sample.
Relics of the Great Exhibition
strapped to their pallets,
awaiting inspection.
Scroll through Kew, its long
departed forests,
its plain collection
of trunks and branches, as
certain ladies
and gentlemen
once strolled, uncertain, past them.
Let Ebony Green
represent
an empire of extinction.
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