Poetry Lani O’Hanlon

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: LANI O’HANLON

Lani O’Hanlon is a writer from West Waterford

LITTLE THEATRE

Hey Presto snow tyres we slide, skid skate down Patrick’s Hill to the gold and red theatre.

Look down; check your whitened shoes are in the centre of a chalked circle O

to stay hidden in this rosy room.

applause like rain. Smile, Mammy says, smile. Swish, the curtains open;

Lights – the colour of sucky sweets.

March, marching lift your feet, swing your arms, right left right left

clop clop

hop onto the right hop onto the left, balance

altogether altogether, toe heel toe heel.

Ha ha ha ha ha the devil laughs, he’s behind you, the audience shouts, behind you but it’s only Dad in a black beard.

Stage left an angel appears

Mam’s long skirts slide across the stage, a silver scaled frock, her shoulder bared, a curve of moon,

she is the one I know skin to skin, breast to cheek, she lifts her skirt to show her legs.

Stars on doors; lights around freckled mirrors.

A Fairy Godmother with a tinfoil wand and Ugly Sisters, who are really men, paint beauty spots on their cheeks.

Tulle like candy floss floats down over my face,

criss-cross ribbons around my ankles, one, two, three.

Ballet feet shush shush across scratched boards.

music turns and now the swans-

Fionuala Lir banished with her brothers, how cold they are, their snowdrop heads

Watch me with a broom, sweep sweep, waltz and whirl, hair like coal, skin like snow, lips like blood, sing

Someday my prince will come.

There’s a stepmother with an apple, a slice in my throat

a whole kingdom goes to sleep, thorns and briars around the castle

marble, cardboard, gold.

(Lani O’Hanlon)

MEDICINE FOR DECEMBER

More bad news on the radio — the loss of another medicine, olibanum – frankincense. Trees overused, burnt, chopped down.

But the Ethiopians take only what they need, cut the bark, gather resin from ancestral trees, make ritual, burn incense, serve coffee with salty popcorn.

Antoinette brought me a present from Senegal, an incense burner, a crooked pot, indentations of their fingers in red clay baked hard under African sun.

In the chapels of childhood, nuggets of incense placed on coals in a crucible. I cuddled into Gran. Smoke censing the air. A thurible swinging forward and back.

After birth, gold, frankincense, myrrh, mysterious shapes in my mouth, from the East, a journey measured out in stars.

The Book of Exodus prescribes frankincense blended with spices to be ground and burnt before the Ark of the Covenant in the wilderness Tabernacle.

This oil embalmed bodies in Egyptian tombs; dates all the way back to Babylon.

Slows down the process of aging, breaks links with the past, a solace for grief, a pulmonary antiseptic.

Through my window sycamores and pines sway forward and back, thorn trees claw at the sky. Far from this place

Boswellia sacra – bark stripped, oozing. Milksap hardening into streaks.

Inhaling, my lungs find the cut where Mam used to be, Dad, my cousin Mary, Antoinette, my grandmothers.

Exhaling, they leave again. Inhaling, I breathe with leaves and trees that bleed more slowly and more sweetly than we ever will.

(Lani O’Hanlon)

THE HOUSE IN OLD BAWN

Late on Christmas day, you bring your children to their father's home, turning away from the closed door; it strikes you how dark

the night is. How hard to see your way back to the rented house with its unhinged gate. Overgrown holly bush in the garden.

Inside, shiny purple wallpaper and a puffed out headrest on the couch makes you bend your head, hunching up confessor-like.

On the radio, Mary Coughlan sings; I can't make you love me if you don't. You put on a coat and scarf, walk, then prepare food, eat.

You watch a film with Brad Pitt. He looks like Mick when you first met him,

both of you so young outside Mulligan's pub in the snow; kisses beneath a red umbrella.

You scrape away layers of old wallpaper, hang new primrose yellow strips, smooth out the puckers with an un-ringed hand. A therapist in your head

advises that now is the time to care for yourself. Cold ashes in the grate. Wind moaning through the holly bush.

(Lani O’Hanlon)

AT DUSK, AT DAWN

at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end. Jack Gilbert

You fall asleep in the armchair a red scarf around your sore throat this evening in January; half-way between your birthday and mine,

your breath, the spaces between. And that we would end up here, half-way between Waterford and Cork, in a Gaeltacht, a hobbit cottage.

In a while I get up and begin dinner. We close the curtains, and drink wine. You prepare for bed earlier than I, letting the dog out to gallop through the night field.

I switch off lights. Read, dozing in my bath. Climbing in beside you. I'll be cold then too hot; when you made the bed you shook the duvet feathers over to my side.

In the morning I wake and hear you in the kitchen radio on. That old Fleetwood Mac song, and I have built my life around you... The cat heavy against my hip, our books piled up either side of the bed.

(Lani O’Hanlon)