Donal Mahoney Poems

In this house
even the bathroom’s
a place of no peace.

I huddle there Sundays
...

The indications used to come
like movie fighter planes in break
formation, one by one, the perfect
plummet, down and out. This time they’re
...

River rafting in Montana
is a fine way to spend
your vacation but it's
not the same as
...

Now that Danny McCarthy had grandchildren in grammar school, he knew up from experience there were problems in education in the 21st century. When his own kids were in school, in the Seventies and Eighties, there were problems but nothing like the problems of today. And when Danny himself was in school back in the Forties and Fifties, almost all the problems in and out of the classroom were manageable as far as Danny could recall.

In the Forties and Fifties, problems in school were largely behavioral, not academic. Danny and his classmates learned the basics of grammar and mathematics in grammar school, did well enough in high school, and then joined the Army or the Marines unless they were one of the few whose families had enough money to send them to college. Going to college in Danny's neighborhood wasn't really held in high esteem. The goal was to get a good job, maybe with the police force or the fire department or to catch on with one of the trades. If that didn’t work out, you joined the service and hoped you didn’t get sent to Korea.
...

'Throw me down the stairs a sandwich, Ollie, I'm hungry, ' said Dr. Olga Sumvitch, hollering up to me from Hell again in her best fractured English.

Although she had spent the last 30 years of her life in the United States working for Monsanto, Dr. Sumvitch still speaks English with a thick accent. I'm one of the few Americans who can always understand her.
...

She's always been a caution,
Aunt Matilda has,
what with her passion
...

Simply because anchors
have little to say means
they'll keep saying it
till others believe.
...

Marcia was 17 the first time thousands of locusts rose from the fields of her father's farm and filled the air, sounding like zithers unable to stop. Her father was angry but Marcia loved the music the locusts made. She was in high school then and chose to make locusts the focus of her senior paper.

At the town library she learned locusts spend 17 years deep in the soil, feeding on fluids from roots of trees that make them strong enough to emerge at the proper time to court and reproduce. Courtship requires the males to gather in a circle and sing until the females agree to make them fathers.
...

The preacher in the duck blind
asks, 'Why seek succor
when a man need only ask
in order to receive it.'
...

Seth and Abigail were a young couple who had run away from their Amish community in Ohio. They wanted to get married and start a new life. After stopping in a number of cities, some big and some small, they found themselves in San Francisco on a Sunday morning in July after riding many a Greyhound bus.

Seth and Abigail had some legitimate concerns about starting a new life among the English, as the Amish call Americans who are not Amish. They both were still very spiritual but they had decided they would like to strike out on their own. They wouldn't be the first Amish couple to leave the community. Some Amish leave and do very well among the English and others have to turn around and go back home.
...