Best Mahoney Poems
A group of older men gather
once a week to talk about life
after a heart attack.
Old Len chews tobacco still
and tells jokes in a voice so low
no one can hear the punch line.
Another man asks Len
to talk louder so they all
can hear the punch line.
That’s when they discover
Len's been telling the same joke
at every meeting, over and over.
The joke’s about a loan officer
who lends a man $10,000 for a
face lift that turns out so good
the lender can’t find him.
With heart attacks in common,
the men yell “Tell it, again, Len!”
Donal Mahoney
Third day on her honeymoon
Sharon asks Butch what it's like
for a man before he gets married.
A bricklayer by trade,
and a man of few words,
Butch doesn’t know what to say
but he knows Sharon has always
liked to go bowling; in fact,
that’s how this odd couple met.
So he tries an analogy although
he doesn’t know it’s an analogy.
From age 12 on, Butch tells her, he
always felt like he had a bowling ball
in his pants; that was a problem.
He couldn’t find pants to fit.
When he became a man he joined
bowling leagues, three or four, and
went bowling as often as he could.
Then Butch tells Sharon he met her
and knew he had to quit bowling
having found a lane of his own.
Donal Mahoney
In the woods soft snow
falls on the first day of spring.
Two daffodils laugh.
Donal Mahoney
Black lives matter
in different ways
to different people
in the American rainbow
especially bus companies
that bounce over potholes
in the big cities of America.
For them money matters.
If blacks stop riding buses
the buses will be empty
except for other poor folk
white, red, yellow, brown
who don’t drive cars
but are too few to keep
the buses bouncing.
Everyone will understand
that black lives matter when
everyone understands
that black money matters
not to blacks alone but
to all stripes in the
American rainbow.
Donal Mahoney
Otis was once a monk
who took no vows, was
free to leave the abbey
and eventually he did.
I met him over chicken wings
at Sadie's Soul Food Grill.
For almost 20 years
every spring and summer
Otis labored in the fields
raising vegetables
and crops of every kind.
In fall and winter he
would gather leaves and
plow the snow, wheel
ancient monks up and down
the endless silent halls.
He loved his work
because he liked to help
anyone in need.
I asked Otis why he left.
He said because at first
he thought life was a burp
somewhere in eternity.
He still believes that but
wants to hear the burp
before he’s in eternity.
Otis likes the chicken wings
at Sadie’s Soul Food Grill,
especially the real hot ones.
He ate chicken at the abbey
but nothing like the wings
at Sadie's Soul Food Grill.
A real treat before eternity.
Donal Mahoney
She’s been making quilts
for half a century and he’s been
making poems that long as well
and every now and then he brings
a chocolate shake to her place
so they can take a break and talk.
He always finds her at the frame,
peering through thick lenses.
"I’m still house bound, Walt,"
she laughs and likes to say.
Once she told him quilts are poems.
She works with scraps of cloth
and he with scraps of words and quilts
and poems are never done until all
the scraps are where they have to be.
Now she's working on a Double Wedding Ring,
a quilt not unlike a sonnet in that both follow
patterns of their own but she likes crazy quilts
because she can improvise with scraps
she finds on floors around the house.
Her job's to make something beautiful
from scraps others might throw away.
He has no problem understanding that.
He saves scraps of words and marries them
in ways some folk find odd or useless.
Finishing her shake she says maybe
they play jazz and just don’t know it.
She likes Miles Davis and puts his album on
when a crazy quilt won't go her way
but she would never listen to Miles while
she’s at work on a Double Wedding Ring.
Yo-Yo Ma, she says, is the man for that.
The old poet says he would never disagree.
Donal Mahoney
Caseworker Determining Eligibility
Cabrini-Green Projects
Chicago
The child, age two, hammocked in the half
moon of his mother’s arms, is locked
in palsy, yet moves an eyelid as I ask,
moves the other as his mother answers,
application form interrogation.
The father was a white policeman.
“Curiosity,” the mother says. “No more.
I didn’t go with him for money.”
Donal Mahoney
Reunions can happen
and leave you speechless.
I’m standing at a bank
of elevators in a hospital
going to visit my wife
when a wheelchair rolls up
carrying my internist
from years ago.
An excellent doctor
who retired to teach,
according to rumors.
Now he’s pushed by a woman
I assume is his wife.
She looks sad
and he looks worse.
He asks how I’m doing
and I say not bad.
I ask how he’s doing
and he says he’s dying.
And adds that he hopes
I never have to.
He says he never realized
despite his patients
dying could be so hard.
Donal Mahoney
Natural Family Planning
has its ups and downs
so to speak but it often
works quite well.
But when the calendar
says not tonight
I ask my wife to please
go in another room
with that banana.
Donal Mahoney
Mary
Mary Eliza Mahoney
birth in 1845 an American black child of former slaves daughter of Mary Jane and Charles Mahoney
at 18 showed interest in healing Humanity
in 1863 and the New England hospital for women and children headed
into the healthcare industry
has a younger sister named Ellen also wanted to become a nurse
but alas she didn't graduate
Mary train long days 16 hours
students then earn $1 to $4 an hour
Mary graduated 1879 as a registered nurse
alongside with three other colleagues as the first black woman nurse in the United States of America
2/6/21
Written words by James Edward Lee Sr 2021©
Sunruse: May 7th 1845 Dorchester Massachusetts
Sunset: January 4th 1926 Boston Massachusetts
Nationality: American
Alma mater: New England Hospital for Women and Children
Blooming for one day
a lily welcomes the sun.
Bumblebees drop in.
Donal Mahoney
It’s your anniversary so
you’re thinking steak
but your wife wants ramen
so you go to a nice place
and order the fancy ramen
which comes with radishes
cut up to look like rosebuds
and costs as much as steak.
You slurp away with
the best of the regulars
until a gold crown falls
from a molar into the ramen.
Seconds later another
gold crown falls off as well.
The next day the dentist says
you need new crowns.
The old ones won’t fit.
He tells you the new ones
will be made of zirconia.
They'll cost $900 each
cheaper than gold
he says in consolation.
In shock you ask him
what do the homeless do.
He says there’s no ER
for dental work but
he’s heard about
a retired dentist
must be in his eighties
who goes into the city
one Saturday a month
and does charity work.
He needs help
your dentist says.
And more folding chairs
in the waiting room.
Donal Mahoney
It was a mistake to take home economics out of the curriculum at so many high schools, says Wally, a retired teacher who has an ongoing interest in education. He taught high school for many years and still misses his students.
At a Walmart recently there was an incident Wally can’t forget. It pained him deeply because it made him think about the quality of high school education today. He’s not convinced it is what it should be at many schools.
He was standing near the dairy case when a young man, not long out of high school, held up a package of margarine and asked Wally if it was butter. Wally at first thought he was kidding but then said it wasn’t butter, that it was margarine.
The young man wanted to know the difference between butter and margarine. Wally told him butter comes from cows and margarine has a vegetable base. The young man turned to his two friends and said, “I’m glad we asked.” They smiled, thanked Wally and headed for the register, margarine in hand.
A week later Wally was at a local charity making a donation and was told the charity had quit giving baskets of food at Christmas after learning several clients had tried to pan fry a turkey. Now they give gift certificates instead.
At the charity Wally also learned that many young people today don’t know how to cook vegetables or fry bacon and eggs. And more than a few have no idea about budgeting or nutrition.
Wally thinks this reflects poorly on secondary education today. When he taught high school, home economics was taught and students who didn’t learn the basics from their parents at home could learn them at school in home economics, even though it was not a required course. Now he thinks it should be, at least for the many who seem to need it.
He says young people today know a lot about cell phones and computers but sadly some of them don’t know the difference between butter and margarine or how to cook a turkey.
A semester of home economics, he says, might help change that. He wonders if a lot of Advanced Placement courses are that important if young people can't fix themselves something to eat. Sandwiches and fast food, he agrees, do not a good diet make.
Donal Mahoney
The Landlord
When finally at 80 Sammy died
Polly gave me from the pantry packets
of dry noodle soup that Sammy
to the end drank down as supper.
Tureens of it, with swallows
from the pint I’d smuggle in, kept
Sammy blinking at the light
the final weeks. I lived below them
at the time and needed more than soup
but in the parlor where they laid him out
we sat on high-back chairs amid the flowers
and marveled at how straight our Sammy lay.
Who prepared him must have brought
his gnomic back, twice at least,
full force across a knee.
Donal Mahoney
An Irish Gathering
Thomas said
you can’t go home again
but I did for my sister
and the christening of her first.
Everyone, on folding chairs, against
the whitewashed basement walls, was there
for ham and beef and beer, the better
bourbons, music, argument and talk.
Maura came; she hadn’t married.
Paddy, fist around a beer, declared
I owed my family the sight
of me more often.
Hannah, thickset now,
gray and apronless,
rose beside the furnace,
wolverined me to the coal bin door
and asked me in the face,
with sibilance and spittle,
who or what it was
that kept me anywhere,
everywhere, but there.
Donal Mahoney