Your barren canvas stretches
Tightly across forgotten states;
Caught between unforgiving waves
And starry mountain peaks,
Your pulse beats unhurriedly
In this hibernation of solitude.
 
Permafrost litters your landscape:
Continuous,
Discontinuous,
Sporadic.
Its frozen core
A hard border to
Fertile soils and
Future disturbance.
But as the ice begins to melt
These borders shift;
Ancient ley lines retreating
North,
Cutting new paths
Across a scenery
That will no longer
Be forgotten.
The far east of Siberia somewhere along the north shore of the Sea of Okhotsk (Image Credit David Baron; CC BY-SA 2.0).
This poem is inspired by recent research, which has found that climate change could make Siberia more habitable by the end of the twenty-first century.
Siberia (also known as Asian Russia),