In Competition No. 3313, you were invited to supply a poem about the worms that were resurrected by scientists after being frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years.

The tiny roundworms, buried deep underground since the late Pleistocene, were brought back to life by being immersed in water and transported to Germany – in a scientist’s pocket – to see what lessons the creatures might yield for 21st-century humanity. (They were, it was discovered, able to survive extreme low temperatures by entering a dormant state called cryptobiosis.)

Their remarkable story produced a smart, lively and varied entry. A commendation to W.J. Webster’s limerick:

A Pleistocene worm from Siberia,

Dug up in the frozen interior,

Had the permafrost thawed

And its life was restored:

Have you ever heard anything eerier?

The winners below pocket £25 each.

Lifelessly, deathlessly,

Slumbering nematodes

Icebound and layered in

Pleistocene rime,

Wait for millennia

Cryptobiotically,

Dormant and motionless,

Frozen in time.

Suddenly wakened by

Microbiologists,

Warming to Holocene

Life, they defy

Settled assumptions of

Geochronology;

Aeons have passed in the

Wink of an eye.

Alex Steelsmith

From the tundra’s underbelly,

We salute you, now defrosted:

Pretty perfect vermicelli

Mammoths might have once accosted.

It was chilly, so we reasoned

Doggo was the best existence –

Quiet, see-through, rather weazened,

Now we’ll fire on all pistons.

In the gulag, keep your head down:

That’s what underpinned our schema,

Why we wriggled in, to bed down

Snug beneath the iced Kolyma.

Now we’re on a Dresden lab slab,

Six-week stint, so no more maybes –

Parthenogenesis! It’s ab-fab –

Babies, babies, babies, babies!

Bill Greenwell

A frozen cradle in the permafrost

reveals the ancient worms’ unique location;

their instinct to survive was never lost

while waiting in suspended animation.

A petri dish assists their new nativity

and soon they squirm, they eat, they reproduce,

we see, through their asexual activity,

a hundred wriggling progeny let loose.

We’ll study them for hints, how to survive

the worst extremes of climate change, we may

discover all we need to stay alive,

with luck these nematodes will show the way.

It seems the measure of our earthly term

may hang upon the habits of a worm.

Sylvia Fairley

We have arrived. We’ve made the news.

We’re sought for TV interviews.

Millennia old, long-time thought lost,

We popped up from the Permafrost.

We’re not advanced. We’re nematodes.

We do not write romantic odes.

We cannot claim a Nobel Prize.

We very rarely theorise.

Sweet music à la Liszt or Brahms?

We don’t have that, or nuclear arms,

And unlike humans in the main,

We live in glacial terrain.

We do what eelworms gotta do.

We live and die ignored by you,

Yet time and circumstance portend

That we’ll consume you in the end.

Basil Ransome-Davies

You’ve resurrected us – for what?

If this is ‘life’ we’d rather not.

Our crunchy, munchy lunch of soil

was innocent of motor oil.

When we popped up for air the smell

was leafy-fresh, not rank as Hell

and if we chose to move around

we didn’t risk a battleground.

(The woolly mammoth, true, had weight

but he was most considerate

unlike your mammoth, built of steel.

Remember, we predate the wheel.)

That world, though not quite Paradise,

was wholesome, clean and, frankly, nice,

and had so much of what you lack.

Do us a favour; put us back!

D.A. Prince

Two lowly worms for aeons were asleep

Encased in ice and given up for dead

But somehow chance permitted them to keep

Their simple life within an icy bed.

So they awoke from dark antiquity

To cast their forty thousand years aside.

Their resurrection to modernity

May offer science secrets that they hide

Of times when dinosaurs were commonplace

And giant beasts had not encountered man.

Within their bodies there may be a trace

Of matter telling how their life began.

If prehistoric worms can live again

Tomorrow we might chat with ancient men.

Frank McDonald

No. 3316: Take five

You are invited to recast Rishi Sunak’s five pledges in verse form. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 6 September.