Donal Mahoney Poems

The rain is very thorough.
Going where I have to go
this summer afternoon
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Why not go over and see Aunt Maude.
She was told yesterday she’s dying
of cancer, and drop in her afghan
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Rolling down the highway
from Chicago to the farm
Bill the barber’s almost home.
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The bog above Bob Gordon's bog
is where they found the body of
an older man floating like a canoe
among the lily pads. He was
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They've been here for years
two blue jays who live in our yard
year round.
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During the day
there might be three cars
parked at different places
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Antonin Scalia is dead, a famous U.S. Supreme Court judge who loved to hunt. He died in bed on a hunting trip, apparently of natural causes.

There were 35 hunters in his group. They flew to a farm in Texas designed to give folks with money a chance to spend it shooting wildlife.
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No, Freddie can't say he mourned when his father died and his father's third wife found Freddie's number and gave him a call to give him the news. His father had been responsible, worked hard, saved his money, put Freddie and his brothers through college but when his mother died and all the boys had grown up and left home, his father disappeared. No forwarding address. After awhile Freddie didn't think that much about him. So he was surprised when this widow he didn't know called and told him his father had been hit by a truck that ran up on a sidewalk and flattened him. Declared dead at the hospital.

Freddie didn't mourn his mother either when she had died although he had spent two years taking her to the best doctors hoping one of them would save her from cancer, not realizing that back in those years there was nothing doctors could do for a cancer so severe and caught so late, certainly not the big-time surgeon who said that he could. He was number one at a teaching hospital and wanted to fatten his mother up so he could operate on her again so all the residents and interns could watch and learn from him as he attempted to do the impossible.
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Many years ago, when I first started working on poems, I would occasionally write a haiku. I did that as a break from writing the "harder" stuff. At least that's what I thought at the time.

Haiku was relatively easy, I thought, once one had mastered the traditional form of 17 syllables in three lines with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third.
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