Rooftop Seed Bank

Above the buses, a quiet nursery keeps its vows, tin trays of dark soil like small eclipses, labels whispering dill, blue flax, fireweed.

Heat from the city rises and loosens the lids of memory, a breeze combs the netting and the young stems nod as if practicing the architecture of rain.

In the seed vault, envelopes sleep in their paper shells, each a collapsed forest, each a future argument against the thin, metallic hunger of streets.

At dusk the caretaker waters and listens to the gulls, their cries stitching the roof to the distant marsh, and the sprouts answer in a green, unlit language.