Poem – Infrastructure Swallows a City (By Donal Mahoney)

It was an ancient city.

All the young people left

as soon as they could

but the old remained

in their mortgaged huts

surrounded by evergreens

that offered a haven

for cardinals and jays,

robins and finches.

No matter the season

birds flew from tree limbs

to feed on seed and suet

put out by too many widows

in slippers and aprons and

too few wives wearing

rouge and lipstick

for terminal husbands they

planned to stack on pyres.

Author Bio:

Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has had fiction and poetry published in various publications in the U.S. and elsewhere. Among them are The Galway Review (Ireland), The Recusant (England), The Missing Slate (Pakistan), Guwahatian Magazine (india), Bluepepper (Australia), The Osprey Journal (Wales), Public Republic (Bulgaria), and The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey). Some of his earliest work can be found at http://booksonblog12.blogspot.com and some of his newer work at https://www.antarcticajournal.com/donal-mahoney-recent-works