Walking this morning from the Museum of Photographic Arts to my car I got pictures from a couple of trees that caught my attention... and a splash of graffiti that someone, probably park grounds keepers, had covered over thinly with black paint.  It wasn't until I downloaded the pictures from my camera to my computer when I got home that one of my favorite poems came to mind.  The wrinkles in the bark of a ficus tree looked vaguely like part of a face I might have seen on an ancient monument.  I'm in the habit of looking for markings on trees that look like eyes, and I found one of those on a eucalyptus tree.  The other picture was the covered area of graffiti.  I thought of Shelley's "Ozymandias."  I guess it's just the way an old retired English teacher's mind works.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.