Scrawled above the boot brush reads:
Brush your fucking boots off!!
Too late for this mass of fallen ash
smothering saplings,
bored by beetles borne on ships’ hulls,
beetles from the east (I’m told).
Just as plagues passed between nations
still pass between nations
by lung, freight, or boot sole,
to carve their way through
ancestral populations,
so-called heroes have come to etch
an obscenely apt inscription
into a plastic plaque that reads:
We acknowledge,
Our recognition,
and Many thanks to The Conservancy.