DEREK TURNER is editor of The Brazen Head, and a novelist and reviewer, who writes for journals including Country Life and the Irish Times. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published in 2022 (Hurst)

Fathers of Botany – Fossil Trees of Greece

“We were searching to rediscover the first seed

So the ancient drama could begin again.” (George Seferis)

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Tree from Titanic time, chlorophyll from Chronos –

A plant to make the Iliad feel young;

Older than Achaea, bough from Europe’s birth,

Corinthian column from anonymous earth.

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Cell-structure chthonic, bark architectonic,

First saplings convert light for all lungs;

Dawns before dinosaurs, green deaths in deep glades

That shivered before any islands were made.

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Steles sway in dead winds, mark skies meteoric –

Ossified weathers striated in stumps –

Hold in their heartwood earth’s earliest mysteries,

The comets and climates that changed before histories.

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Rock sounds of ages and petrified tracks –

Trees shooting endless in verdant triumphs,

Creatures of ancient wing, instinct with sap and spring,

Once stood on these redwoods’ spread rooftops to sing.

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Sang songs of the spheres, remote, melancholic,

Strange songs for lost woods in an alien tongue –

Harmoniously unify heavens and world

As seeds from stone cones let Creation unfurl.

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Then day cataclysmic: deep doom from first physics:

Drums beating, bass booms as world structure unslung,

Ashfalls before Hades, heats pre-Hephaestus,

Flames black out the birds, stones alter the atlas.     

II

Metamorphosis – an ageless land’s axis,

New architect orders for the new world just sprung –

Stump of the sacred grove, and pillar of Zeus –

Shoots for the Stagirite, seeds Theophrastus.

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Human analogies bud bright philosophic:

Trees rise, carry crowns, then return to the dung.

Though statues, they sow evergreenness from roots;  

Even now that they’re dead, we climb them for truths.