The Trip We Didn't Take
finds me now in a small village
in Lithuania or Latvia my hand
holding a bucket above the old
well half filled with cold
water at the center of Viļaka
maybe or Geruliai where
in the middle years of the war
your people were slaughtered
by their own or ran to the shore
to a ship to a life like yours
a chosen people freed from
their unsanctioned reapers
and brought to a land we
all wish were as holy
as exceptional and free
as its owners choose to say
your family came from a place
like this I say to myself on
that trip we didn’t take with
water emptying itself down
my arm from the bucket I see
now is in disrepair a term
that implies that repair could
be enough to make it itself
to make it whole and home
again for the water that slipped
between your ancestors’ lips
or in another life your own
and with my sleeve sodden
I rub the dust that limns the ring
of stones of the well’s mouth
so that should you come here too
you could hold yourself to it
could dip your head and even
were it still holey the vessel
drink full with clean hands
John Maher is an award-winning journalist and poet living in Brooklyn, NY. He is digital editor and associate news editor at Publishers Weekly and co-editor of The Dot and Line. He has written for such publications as Esquire.com, Thrillist, Kirkus Reviews, Electric Literature, Hyperallergic, and The Rumpus, among others. His poems have been acclaimed by Mark Wunderlich as “sharp, short, and striking, notable for their control and their certainty. I admire the endings of the poems in particular, with their modest flourishes, their brandished daggers."