Seed Vault at Thaw

Below the parking lots, the vault keeps its winter, rows of tin drawers breathing in a language of dust. Each packet is a folded moon, a label gone soft, each grain an address the future may yet remember.

When the thaw reaches the city, it comes first as water threading the stairwells, a silver note under the doors. The concrete listens. The sealed jars answer with silence, and inside that silence, green things rehearse their names.

I imagine the gardeners of another century leaning over the cold shelves as over a sleeping harbor, their lamps making little dawns on the glass, their hands careful as rain over a field of nerves.

If the world breaks open, let it break this way: not in a single roar, but in apricot stems, in bean leaves lifting like small flags of astonishment, in a city learning again the size of its appetite.