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, Acumen, The Blue Nib and The Yellow Nib.
Christy
A crowd of Dubs goes crazy for the band
up on stage, as if they were their cousins.
Under the spotlight, the singer takes his stand
and pours his heart out to the audience,
bare-chested as an Apache, a gold-ringed hand
casting a spell, weaving Celtic visions
of otherworldly beauty with his voice.
He opens an astral door to Narnia
and all the Aslan-wonder C.S. Lewis
created in his books, this shaman-warrior
hailing from the meanest streets of Finglas
and all his own hurt history. The bel-canto
laureate of defeat and psychic knockdowns,
drink and drugs, despair and dole queues, soars
like a seagull through the yearning song’s dimensions
into another realm, through registers,
carrying the crowd aloft, to heaven’s
gate, their wild chants echoing among stars.
Visitation
A woman who’s a girl who’s a boy who’s a woman,
it’s hard to tell with that shaved head,
appears on Raidió Teilifís Éireann,
The Late Late Show. Gay calls her Sinéad
O’Connor. She stands in the spotlight, singing
a song like a hymn on Christmas Eve
in Mass, on the altar, eyes closed, glistening
silence around her, till the words sung achieve
weightlessness… It’s like we’re in space
listening to stars all around us, their sheer
heartbreaking beauty, full of grá, laced with brón.
And then the camera pans to her face.
Transfigured, transported, like the children of Lir,
she’s revealed as a fairy child, a wild swan.
Lintukoto
Some day she will go to Finland
and live the dream. Happiness.
A wooden cottage by a lake.
Forests. Saunas. Northern lights.
Every morning Christmas morning.
Every night a patchwork quilt
of stars and silence. Sibelius. Larksong
waking her just after dawn.
Walking hand in hand with her
lover by the lakeshore, cooking
dinner in the evening, white
wine chilling in the ice-
bucket. Later, in the sauna,
pouring water on the rocks,
löyly steaming up like woodsmoke,
she’ll sigh and inhale cedar scent.
It all seems open-aired, idyllic.
Scandinavian paradise.
The perfect place to live your best
life etc., learn to breathe,
and simply be. Perhaps she’ll find
her Moomin Valley of the mind
and live happily ever after,
in the far north, herself, at home.
I wish her luck, or, as the Finnish
say, onnea! Some day she’ll send
a postcard back from Lintukoto,
that misty realm, home of the birds.
Westport
Once upon a time in Westport,
County Mayo, I spent the night
in a B&B, a last resort
against the rain, funds being tight
on the camping holiday me and my mate
had set off on a week before
and suffered through until the state
of our tent, after torrential downpour
the previous night, persuaded us
we weren’t cut out for outdoor living
and needed a proper roof, less porous
walls and maybe a more forgiving
mattress than the hard ground we’d
lain on for five nights. And so
here we were in a slightly faded
guest house down by the river, flow-
ing out to the wild Atlantic, snug
in an attic room with two twin beds
and view of the mall, tree-lined, bug-
haunted in the sunset’s shreds
of marmalade-orange radiance
under the greeny-copper coloured
evening heavens. In the distance
traditional music echoed. John Ford
could have made a picture here.
A first impression reinforced
next morning in the handsome parlour
where we had breakfast (full fry), nursed
mild hangovers and inspected
the Proclamation on the wall,
framed, in glass, revered, respected,
venerated even, sacral
as the Sacred Heart above the fireplace
or Our Lady’s statue in the corner.
The landlady, too, well in her 70s,
was from another era, pinafore
and cardigan from family photos
seen of your granny’s granny, slippers
and stories of the Rising: how those
“bashstard black n’ tans” shot nippers
“in broad daylight” on these quiet streets.
We listened to her bring the past
back to life and cleaned our plates
before we headed off, our last
glimpse of her in the front doorway,
waving as we hit the road,
an Ireland’s Own front cover; grey
morning sunstreaked, faintly rainbowed.
Lightweaver
for Kevin Collins, painter & weaver
Like Thomas Hardy, only in acrylics,
he brings a world to life, out of the darkness
into the light, emerging from its matrix,
butterfly-like, to shimmer on the canvas
like a rainbow after a downpour, lucent brushstrokes
before our eyes, prismatic as stained glass
in which we see our lives in all their local
colour woven. As if by handloom. Cross-stitched
threads of pigment recreate a pastoral
Ulster, blending into urban, rain-blotched
streets: the Fairy Glen to City Hall
in Belfast all a part of the enriched
warp and weft he brings to seeing things:
Lowry’s bar on a summer’s night in Hilltown,
lamplights sparkling like angelic beings;
the Lagan, dancing, dazzling, Parisian;
Ardglass Harbour, light-filled, early evening’s
shadows cool down by the water. Linen
lift and lightness, luminescence, inter-
twined with down-to-earthness, as in Hardy’s
Wessex visions, glamourous and glum where
these coalesce, like puddles full of galaxies.
Newry. Warrenpoint. Annalong. Rostrevor.
O’Connell Bridge. All light-drenched tapestries.
The Galway Review 