Francis O’Hare was born in Newry, Co. Down, in 1970. His first full collection, Falling into an O, was published by Lagan Press, Belfast, in 2007. A further pamphlet collection was published by Lagan Press in 2009, entitled Alphaville. He published his second collection, Somewhere Else, with Lagan Press in 2011. In the same year, he also published a collection in America, with Evening Street Press, Ohio, entitled Home and Other Elsewheres. A new collection, Sailing To Omeath, was published by Arlen House, Dublin, in January 2020. He has published poems in various magazines in Ireland, the U.K. and the United States, including Poetry Ireland Review, Evening Street Review, Glasgow Review of Books, The Galway Review, PN Review, The Blue Nib and The Yellow Nib.
Tadpoles
Like commas wriggling
around a blank page,
or little black Caspers
the Friendly Ghost
in the haunted house
of our back field’s well,
they swam amok,
squiggling out of
the translucent jelly
fringing green water
to go boldly beyond
like cosmonauts,
metamorphosing
on their travels
into little green men
with slimy skins
who looked like jockeys
on invisible horses,
or farmers squatting
having a shite.
Croaking and grunting
amongst the rushes,
on hearing you coming
they’d make quantum leaps
into further dimensions,
deeper and darker
than earthlings could fathom,
in an eye-blink, hey presto!
returned to their realm.
Cow Dung
That summery smell
of cow dung recalls,
à la Proust’s novel,
my childhood, the Ingalls
on telly, and days
that set sail like yawls
into the haz-
y blue middle-distance.
Wagon Wheels. Matinées
of Zorro. Our aunts’
farm near Banbridge.
Haystacks like giants
in sunshine, the midge-
haunted shade of its eaves
our noontime refuge
from the heat. Cows and calves
flicking their tails
or ears, like kerchiefs,
at flies. Climbing bales
of hay like the sky-boys
pictured in newsreels
of New York, the guys
lunching on girders
far above the hot city’s
traffic and traders.
Then going to the well
or the river, like herders
after the cattle,
to cool off, and always
that rich earthy smell.
Of a time. And a place.
The Cowboys
Cruising along in my Chevrolet
Matiz, listening to Acker Bilk’s
‘Aria’ on the stereo, Sunday
silence everywhere, roads draped in silk’s
gossamer haze, I’m carried along
by the clarinet melody back to the days
of the 1980s, the back seat, a song
playing on cassette in my da’s car, a blaze
of colour around us as we headed down south
on our summer holidays, under blue skies
intense as the flavour of Opal Fruits, Louth
opening up before us, our eyes
equally opened to all we could see
out of the curved racing car windows
of our Datsun 160Y, as the country
and western hits wafted, like hayseed, around us:
Kenny Rodgers, ‘Lucille’, Dolly Parton, ‘Jolene’,
and Charley Pride, ‘The Wings of a Dove’,
my da tapping time on the steering wheel, green
countryside blurring by, cloud trails above
like the ones in ‘Ghostriders in the Sky’,
Johnny Cash epic as thunder, while we
rode on, singing along to the cry
“Yippie-yi-o, Yippie-yi-yay”,
down to Dundalk or Drogheda, Meath’s
prairie landscape there in the distance
tempting us on, like pioneers, breaths
held in hope of getting to Butlin’s
this year at last. Before sundown at least.
The Galway Review 