by Fred Duncan

Auroras pulse and shimmer on Spitsbergen’s Isfjord,
And midnight suns reflect on rock and ice and snow;
Deep within the frozen ground, life and wealth are stored:
A bank of seeds from field and forest, plain and high plateau –
The legacy of pome and pod, berry, cone and gourd,
And staple crops, and grains we barely know:
But what happens when the permafrost has thawed?
The harvest that we reap is the harvest that we sow.

• Spitsbergen Island, Svalbad Archipelago, Norway
  Poet’s note – it contains one of the world’s most
  important repositories of seeds, in an underground
  vault, built into an abandoned coal mine.