Electrified

A
whole
month spent
waiting, planning
and it’s finally the first
of December, the day you
squeeze
into your Christmas jumper,
take out the crib, your elf, scarf
the tree with tinsel, flashing lights,
dot it
with baubles. Then you glitz the mantlepieces,
console tables with snowglobes, santas and reindeer
before jewelling the fence with multi-coloured fairylights.
After you write your page-long Christmas wish-list, you settle
down to watch Home Alone twice a day for the next twenty four days
(you’ve already seen it over fifteen hundred times), all the lights powered on
and you
so charged
you’re
electrified.

Faye Boland won the Robert Leslie Boland Prize, 2018, and the Hanna Greally International Literary Award, 2017. She placed third in the Bere Island poetry competition, 2024. Her chapbook Fishing For Tea was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry chapbook competition, 2024, and she was highly commended in the Desmond O’ Grady competition, 2019. Her first poetry collection Peripheral was published in September, 2018 by The Manuscript Publisher.