Margaret Mary Rachel Leary Brown, (Part I)

A Poem for my grandmother- my mother’s mother and my friend, to tickle her spirit in that unknown country she’s been traveling through for so long now. She died in 2018 at the age of 91 and I often wonder what it must have been like for her to have been in Butte back then, in those far off days of western wilderness transitioning into the modern world. I’m super lucky my family had a camera and made incredible efforts to document that special time and place. It was a rare thing for sure.

Butte veins ran black and green in Forty.
Poison copper-blood stained palms and coal-breath shanty town blues echoed fiery Sunday psalms. Aboveground, Butte slept in soot and neon. Candles flared, and the walls of quartz turned stained glass - green for the famine fields, red for the bloody Galway docks and blue for the ghost of Mary.  

While the girls hunkered down safe in trembling timber rooms, the boys danced fisticuffs and worshiped the moon with beer and whiskey.  Next morning down in the Anaconda drift, the shafts groaned like organ pipes and men from once prosperous Celtic clans carved subterranean cathedrals vaulting ever downward into heaven. Deeper and deeper yet, and deeper still deeper than the fruitless potato pits their desperate mums and grannies dug with hands like flint stones back home.

Humming a tune halfway between a jig and a dirge, they wore shamrocks on their tongues. They were Irish in Montana, halfway between the famine and the frontier, and it was there they became dynamite and dust.

-JPV 2025