Poem Vaulted Seeds After The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Hoarded at the heart of an Arctic mountain, within an archipelago of snow: an ark of seeds. Cocooned against soil, nuclear bodies hunker and wait for some future hungerscape. A gathering of crops, varied faces folded into foil, shuttered from the earth. Lentil, dark and round and pebble-smooth. Barley’s slender husk of an eye. Each wrinkled chickpea the embryonic head of a bird. Sister seeds, in Aleppo, shelter abandoned in the rubble of war. The snow is a silence except for how the seeds call out to one another across landmasses that shift and warm. Svalbard reindeer swivel their ears to listen. Foxes pause ghostlike on the permafrost.With one quadrate eye, the vault reflects a frigid blue sea. Ringed seals bob and dive among the glassy floes. The vault’s stone hull juts like a shipwreck in the drifted ice while polar bears chuff and lumber past the door. Inside, thousands upon thousands of promises to feed what may remain. Doomsday, its other name. Because we’ve already planted what’s to come. Edited by Dava Sobel

of crops, varied faces folded into foil, shuttered from the earth. Lentil, dark and round and pebble-smooth. Barley’s slender husk of an eye. Each wrinkled chickpea the embryonic head of a bird.

Sister seeds, in Aleppo, shelter abandoned in the rubble of war. The snow is a silence except for how the seeds call out to one another across landmasses that shift and warm.

Svalbard reindeer swivel their ears to listen. Foxes pause ghostlike on the permafrost.With one quadrate eye, the vault reflects a frigid blue sea. Ringed seals bob and dive among the glassy floes.

The vault’s stone hull juts like a shipwreck in the drifted ice while polar bears chuff and lumber past the door. Inside, thousands upon thousands of promises to feed what may remain. Doomsday, its other name.

Because we’ve already planted what’s to come.

Edited by Dava Sobel