“Seed Potatoes”

By Jennifer M. Phillips

 

 

Seed Potatoes

 

In my lean days I picture the seed potatoes

rotating in my Grandad’s work-seamed fingers

the point of his knife deft between their eyes,

 

those small hands with acquaintance and knowhow

to leave enough flesh behind to nourish

each node, and to tell the sprouting from the blind.

 

It was a multiplication as of loaves

and fishes for the wartime allotment’s

soft dikes of composted soil,

 

each cleave rolled tenderly under

in a straight string-laid corridor between

tented bean-stakes and turnip turrets,

 

his guns had barely had time to go silent,

smoke just cleared from the piles

of blitzed brick across Argyle Avenue, his shallow sleep

 

intermittent in memory of siren-fractured nights,

making do for years with bits of Greenland

whale-meat, an egg, a single loaf, a spud or two

 

for a whole household. Each brown eye,

he set so the roots would strike deep, and watch

for the corpse-fingers to reach up through the ground.

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