St Patrick’s Day
and Flaherty’s Man of Aran
Sunday after Merwin’s passing
the no man’s land between elections
and a few of the best lines
ever written on the planet
still:
these ice pick winds
the impertinent discord from a menage
a trois of great tailed grackles
whose deep songs can’t keep the
silence away
still:
there are the words     indispensable
cried out, spoken, left behind
if not for them, we’d be blown to smithereens.

The breath ebbs
the waves crash into the Inishmore rocks
as remote as the moon’s.

John Macker grew up in Colorado and studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He has published 9 full-length books of poetry, 2 audio recordings and several broadsides and chapbooks over 30 years. His most recent are Atlas of Wolves,bThe Blues Drink Your Dreams Away, Selected Poems 1983-2018, Gorge Songs (with Denver woodblock artist Leon Loughridge),Blood in the Mix (with El Paso poet Lawrence Welsh) and part three of his “Badlands” trilogy, Disassembled Badlands published by Colorado’s Turkey Buzzard Press, 2014.