from my mother’s father:
a cardboard box full of opaque
film containers
cradling
desiccated garden seeds –
canisters labeled with grease pencil
in his shaky hand:
Italian parsley,
Ma’s-Myra hybrid tomatoes,
marigolds, 1997 –
his legacy of
long-gone growing seasons –
omitted from his will,
just like me.
He would have preferred
these
carefully culled
kernels
of creation
claimed by one of his own
gender.
Instead they sat abandoned
beneath the greenhouse planting table
where they found me
overflowing
with beginnings,
rattling with spring.
