"My Internal Impression of Mendel Shattered" by Michael J. Galko
I honestly cannot remember if the impression
was from textbooks or simply manufactured
in my mind. The monk, tending his garden of peas,
alone, the monastery perched on a high hill,
accessible only via a long and arduous trail,
inhabited by a few silent brothers, swishing along
in their robes, tending to the goats, the firewood,
the water to be hoisted from the well. Mendel,
meanwhile, in the garden, in silent contemplation
with a mystery of life, the secrets of inheritance,
that must hold a key to closeness to God, or to
some deeper understanding of his creation.
I picture him by candlelight, tending to his ledger:
round, wrinkled, yellow, green, white flowers or
pink, quietly recording by the dim glow in his
frosted window what one parent bestows to its
children, or can bestow, given the odds. And then
I visited Brno, where the monastery is, invited
as a geneticist, a profession that would not exist but
for Monsignor Mendel and his peas. Every feature
of the image was wrong. Where it was smooth-
wrinkles appeared, where the leaves had a certain
shape they now curled to another. There is no hill,
no path but the few steps from a functional little
building to the famed urban garden. The monastery
is just off the town center, a few steps away from
a bustling streetcar line. Even in its day, when Mendel
ran it as head of the local Church, it was crowded
with visitors, the local gentry, brewmasters whom
Gregor consulted about the abbey’s own strong ales,
experts on public health for his crusades to improve
sanitation and combat disease. By all accounts he
was gregarious– social to a fault, and often leaned
in too close as he tried to part local widows from their
inheritances, for the benefit of the local church, of course.
He died a great man of the town, respected, revered,
his notebooks that recorded his observations on
plant breeding tucked in a musty desk, one interest
among many, lying fallow in wait of a more fertile soil.
Michael J. Galko is a scientist and poet who lives and works in Houston, TX. He was a 2019 Pushcart Award nominee, a finalist in the 2020 Naugatuck River Review narrative poetry contest, and a finalist in the 2022 Bellevue Literary Review poetry contest. In the past year he has had poems published or accepted at Talking River Review, Equinox, Gargoyle, Louisville Review, Tar River Poetry, Noon: journal of the short poem, and The Paterson Literary Review, among other journals.
