RADHA MARCUM
Hours of American Prairie
We took a walk over the silicates the luster
and much dullness that is the incremental
breakdown of an inland sea-bed of we
who script cirrus lenticular waxing gibbous
over the lake surface its infinite metals
cut by buffleheads and grebes and wind
from one of many directions we received
the grebes’ red stripe itinerant signals
written into us remainders of migration
over American prairie many homes making
easy comfort in that dirt in the birded
views where we marked arrivals wigeons
gadwalls coots every year fewer rising
in eye-waters every year more we to braid
with birds between dips the grebes’
red stripe struck the red receptors of us
the hours of ourness breaking down in grass
where our minds could green or nest next
Radha Marcum’s collection Bloodline received the 2018 New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. Rooted in ecological, social, and personal landscapes of the American West, her work explores correlations between outer environment and what poet Muriel Rukeyser called our in-vironment. She teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Colorado.