Donal Mahoney- Three Poems

Tommy is the Man

Tommy is the only man

for miles around who can knot a tie. 

Old farmers come to town on Saturday

and wave from pickups with respect

when they see Tommy on the street

out for a walk in his black suit.

Tommy is the man they know

their families will call to knot 

their ties and close their caskets.

The Capitalist Way

It is easier for a camel to pass

through the eye of a needle

than for one who is rich 

to enter the kingdom of God, 

Jesus told his disciples.

Centuries later Warren

an investor in America

heard about this and 

asked Fu a manufacturer

in China to make 

millions of 12-foot needles.

Then he asked Ahmad 

a bedouin in Oman

to breed smaller camels.

Look for the IPO on Wall Street. 

Before Michael Brown and Freddie Gray

Who celebrates 

the birthday of a tree?

Birds and squirrels, perhaps,

but not Michael Brown 

and not Freddie Gray

and not Rufus Jackson, who was

hung from a weeping willow in 1863.

Rufus stole an apple pie

cooling on a window sill,

a farmer’s wife said. 

She told her husband about it 

when he came in from threshing.

An uncle found Rufus

and cut him from the tree.  

His family buried him 

behind a willow not too far 

from a barn in Mississippi 

where two men took Emmitt Till, 

a boy from the city, in 1958. 

Both men said Emmitt had

whistled at a white man’s wife. 

The two men beat Emmitt, 

gouged an eye out, shot him 

in the head, tossed his body 

in the Tallahatchie River, not far 

from the grave of Rufus Jackson,

said to have stolen an apple pie, then 

hung from a weeping willow in 1863.

Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri.