Quince

Hilary Sideris

This yellow, pear-like, 
knobby fruit is served 

in wedding cakes in Crete. 
Its pale flesh blushes red 

when baked, the color 
of fertility. Crossbred for 

size & sweetness, today’s 
crop succumbs to heat, 

new strains of pests. Blessed 
are the barren who will

never feel birth’s pain, 
Medea’s chorus sings.

The Science

In Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori writes: "Like most modern crops, quinces are at risk of inbreeding" as a result of farmers selecting the traits "that most mattered to them" over millennia - largeness and sweetness. Just as a failed pregnancy, a failed birth, or the inability to conceive is tragic, so is a crop so inbred, so narrow in genetic diversity that it fails to adapt to change. 

The Poet

Hilary Sideris has published poems in The American Journal of Poetry, Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, The Daily Drunk, Free State Review, Gravel, Mom Egg Review, Rhino, Room, Salamander, Sixth Finch, Sylvia and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. Her most recent book, Animals in English, poems after Temple Grandin, was published by Dos Madres Press.

Next poem: the boiler man comes to do the service by Rachel Burns