a poem found as if in amber amidst
“An Ancient Flower Trapped in Amber” by Nicola Twilley,
The New Yorker online, February 16, 2016.
The flowers are slim and small and trumpet-shaped
flaring out and out and out and out and out
and out of which a single spindly tube protrudes.
Forty-five million years ago, they landed
in the sticky sap of a tree
now extinct
in a forest
that no longer exists
on Earth.
the tree died,
they submerged
in layers of gravel and limestone
and finally thrust upward into the foggy hills of a new world
like aliens
welcomed,
documented:
Strychnos electri . . .
electri . . .
after the Greek word
for amber.
