Child, you had eight great-great grammas, 
that’s how the tree works, 
but this one in sepia photo
with posture like steel 
steamed to America at age fourteen, 
married the coal-haired sailor who asked 
Who set your head on fire? 
Who froze the flame?

Her inky-haired daughter, your great gramma 
with steely drive in the Great Depression
worked her way through university
studying ornithology 
while raising crow-haired children.

Her youngest son wandered to California, 
your grampa bearded in sable, 
paired up with a steamy woman of Afro top
back to the land raising illegal crop, 
then to legal vines, stable life. 

Their daughter, your brunette mother 
of dusky skin and choir voice
home-schooled, then PhD in feminist history
wed to a Jewish song-writing organic farmer 
who looks like a smiling porcupine. 

But you, dear girl, dear niece,
dear sweet amazing pumpkin
with eyes of steel, 
Who set your head on fire? 
Who froze the flame?

See the soft soul
of one chiseled girl 
in a vast city, Baltimore,
surreptitiously tipping books
to learn of ovary, sperm, egg,
singing in the Episcopal choir.

Her beauty is her enemy.
She escapes the choirmaster
to a public school staying late to peer
through the one and only microscope,
pursued by boys, men,
watching cells replicate, grow
feeling twin passion 
a brain for science, a womb for womanhood.

A chance for university, scholarship 
encouraged by a father of no education.
In the Great Depression she boards the train
for biology as a discovery, not a trap.

Sixteen years in St. Louis at a microscope 
over Drosophila chromosomes, 
a woman in a man’s lab. 
All the good men go to war. 
A professor steals credit. 

Half starved, doctorate achieved, 
Japan radioactive, 
love unleashed, 
last egg saved.
I’m born.