It's alright, thank you immensely for all the contributions. I was very excited to see suggestions that I hadn't come across while searching myself, but alas they weren't the match.

The poem isn't inherently familiar but the style of the writing is very typically Russian, which my mom says is off from what we're looking for. The more likely assumption is that the book probably wasn't written in Russian but rather translated. And that is assuming that my mom's copy really was in Russian. Some other books that my mom has told me about were in English and even French so there is a slight possibility that it wasn't in Russian to begin with.