Short Tankards Poems

Jo King loved frothy tankards of beer
Which she drank every day of the year
Interred in a keg
She swallowed each dreg
So her tombstone reads, "Wish you were here!"...

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gather wares for market day
and cauldrons of the land
baneful stock for the boiling pot
before the evening’s end

tankards spill and taverns heave
upon these Beltane days
see magic folk and sorcerers
on an otherwise malaise

then pack the carts and disappear
before the robin sees
and woe betide the straddlers
caught there on Gallows’ Eve


...

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we met in glass jars
on the Beagle in the Pacific
I'd never seen anything
like you before, your hair, your smile, 
your huggable eyes, thrown together
by beards and tankards
grabbed from every sun, but
you reflected curves onto my glass
and maimed my stopper for oceans
now we sit on different shelves
but I can still hear you sing
in the darkened storages
and that's more or less
how it was between us
for hundreds 
if not thousands
of years...

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There once was a mermaid named Lea
Claimed delusional sailors at sea
So a captain set sail
Hopeful the tale to dispel
But returned with kelp on his knee

Once t'was a captain with kelp on his knee
Decided to pay sailors a fee
The ship they all dubbed
And the decks were scrubbed
As he sought the mermaid named Lea

Once was a sailor with story to tell
If he drank tankards of ale for a spell
His captain gone daft
Cast off on a raft
And there was Lea in the swell...

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Everyone who has money
should drop it in a vat and
anyone who needs money

should take what they need 
a Swede, a Dane and two 
Norwegians tell Fred, also an

economist who flew in from Yale.
After a three-day seminar in the
Antarctic, the four men sit down 

with tankards of ale, each comfy 
in a chaise lounge chair on 
an ice floe slowly melting.

Back at Yale, CNN interviews Fred 
about his book on the seminar.
The CIA is now investigating.


Donal Mahoney...

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