Donal Mahoney- A Poem

 

So Fingertips Kiss

 

Five kids, eight years. 

And then one day my wife 

shouts to me on the tractor

roaring in the field:

 

“I’ve had enough.”

And like a ballerina,

she rises on one foot, sole

of the other foot firm

 

against her knee

and with arms overhead

so fingertips kiss,

she smiles,

 

pirouettes,

and then like a helicopter

lifts into the air,

whirls over the garage

 

and keeps rising.

I can do nothing now

but curse

and be proud.

 

As if at the ballet,

I applaud from the tractor

and blink at the inferno

as she hits the sun.

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Donal Mahoney has worked as an editor for one publication or another for most of his life, probably because words are the one thing he can handle without making too many mistakes. Tools and mechanical things have always buffaloed him. But give him a blank page, and he'll happily step back and throw words at it like buckshot. And then he'll step forward and keep rearranging them until the deadline, real or imagined, arrives.