Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Donal Mahoney- Three Poems & Photo



                                     Arrangement and photography by Carol Bales


Gardening in Autumn

She’s been a gardener for years
but more and more she brings 
flowers inside to arrange a

new garden on her mantel.
She’s in transition, she says,
but remembers summer fondly

in the autumn of her life
and sees winter coming so 
she gardens on the mantel now.

There, winter’s not a problem.
Her arrangement, she explains,
has a dahlia, last flower of summer, 

bold above hydrangea leaves
burning red in the midst of fall.
The mugo pine warns of winter.

The pine she’s had for 20 years, 
remembers planting it and hopes 
she’s an evergreen as well.



First Frost

In the glow 
of the porch light
one moth
a final fandango
nowhere to go



A Widow and Her Pekingese

Summer evenings
after the news at 6 p.m.
the Widow Murphy comes out

of her tiny bungalow and sits
on her front porch swing
with her ancient Pekingese 

yapping mournfully in her lap.
She waves to certain people,
just a few, while ignoring most

although she knows every neighbor
after her long reign on the porch
as the queen of our block.

We live next door but she never
waves to us or says hello to me
not even back when I was 10

and offered to mow her lawn free 
for nothing, as I used to put it. 
She simply looked away and let 

the Pekingese yap her answer.
My father told me then not to worry
about the Widow Murphy’s ways.

Her husband died in Korea, he said.
They never found her son in Viet Nam
and she had a daughter doing life

for murdering a man the jury must
have known had beaten her for years. 
The man was her husband and a cop. 

Later in my teens my mother said
the Widow Murphy had every right
to be a private person and live out

the remnant of her life as she saw fit. 
But when I was 10 cutting our grass,
I thought she was a ventriloquist

and the Pekingese her dummy
yapping for all the world to hear:
Life isn’t fair, isn’t fair, isn’t fair.


———————————————————————
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
 
 

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