Inheritance

As it turns out, trying to write a chapbook is pretty hard.

If you're interested in learning more about Nikolai Vavilov, this article is a pretty handy introduction. I'd like to mention, however, that my family's origins are in Lithuania, a country which was treated terribly under Soviet rule, and that this poem is by no means a work of non-fiction. My grandfather was, as far as I'm aware, never present in the Siege of Leningrad.

Here it is.

"Inheritance"

The full-blown golden cheer
of bursting sunflowers and corn

the dark smell of dirty earth
tilled soft beneath our toes, 

the sparkle of fertile fields
through a sixteen-hour sun,

all connect us to this summer land
the way only farming can.

Planting seeds in the ground,
a revision of Babylonian botany:

their hanging gardens lushly green
and overwhelmed—

we’re much less decadent here,
our gardens grounded in the earth.

Do you, sweet brother, recall our grandfather’s past
our tangled Russian roots?

How, throughout the siege
he protected Nikolai’s irreplaceable, edible seeds

to see them survive nine-hundred days
of hunger, cold and pain?

I stand with you to look in the waning light,
twin silhouettes against the horizon,

tall, frenzy-haired with arms akimbo
though you always looked more like him.