The Mummers

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The Mummers

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THE LINNET'S WINGS (ISSN:2009-2369) Lakepoint, Mullingar, Co Westmeath, ROI

Designed by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick, 2017

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, mail the publisher at thelinnetswings@gmail.com Ordering Information: Single Copies available from our website: www.thelinnetswings.org Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, mail the publisher at thelinnetswings@gmail.com ISBN­13: 978­1545415184

Spring 2017 FIRST EDITION 4 /2017 Printed by CS Amazon Frontispiece: 'Christ displaying his Wounds,' about 1625–35 by Giovanni Antonio Galli, called Lo Spadarino

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Other Publications by The Linnet´s Wings "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ISBN 13: 978-1480176423 "The House that Jack Built" ISBN-13: 978-1483977669 "One Day Tells Its Tale to Another" by Nonnie Augustine ISBN-13: 978-1480186354 "About the Weather-- Spring Trending" by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN-13: 978-0993049330 "This Crazy Urge to Live" by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN-13: 978-099304909 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN-13:978-1522869504 "Three Pounds of Cells" by Oonah V Joslin ISBN-13: 978-0993049378

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CONTENTS

FRONT MATTER

Prologue: The Rewrite xiii Epigraph: Nobody is sleeping in the sky xiv

LITTLE POEMS 1

Calle Cerra Murals by Stephen Zelnick 2 Street Art Graffiti, Santurce, San Juan Puerto Rico

FAERY 11

Le Mort Du Cygne: Leda and the Swan by William Butler Yeats 13 An Irish Fairytale, Oisín's Mother (Sadhbh The Daughter of Boderg) 14 A POEM IN A REVELATION 27 Editorial: Happy Birthday Linnet's Wings by Oonah V Joslin 28 Interior Spaces by Janet Reed 29 Guadalupe of the Cupboard by Clare McCotter 32 Ellipsis (The Between) by Elizabeth Hitchcock 34 Revenant by James Graham 35 Emigration by Wendy Howe 36

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In The Dark by Dolores Duggan 37 Magnify by Lesley Timms 39 Twenty Five by Robert Beveridge 40 Hard Winter by Jim Hatfield 41 A Trullo Speaks by Maggie Mackay 42 Candescent by Wendy Howe 43 l(one)liness a leaf by Cordelia M. Hanemann 44 Northumberland by Harry Gallagher 45 Everything Under the Sun by Bob Beagrie 46 Grotto of Peche Merle by Roberta Feins 48 Pas de Deux by Cordelia M. Hanemann 49 On the night of your leaving party by Trish Delaney 50 My Father, Blind Too Soon by Tom Sheehan 52 Zero by Rp Verlaine 54

BETWEEN THE STORIES 67 Ulysses (Chapter One) by James Joyce 58 Glossary 76

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THE LINNET'S WINGS

HONEY AND SMOKE 89 SPANISH NEW WORLD POETRY ESSAY AND TRANSLATIONS

Tongues of Fire: Puerto Rican Poets between Empires by Stephen Zelnick 80 “Tierra !” 82 from “Profecías” 83 "Ante La Historia" 84 "Himno a America" 90 "Himno" 91 "Minha Terra" 92 "Cancion de Antilles” 93 "A Puerta Rico" 95

CLASSIC ART

A Distinguished Member Of The Humane Society/Edwin Henry Landseer 25 Lorelei by Albert Pinkham Ryder 30 On The Beach, Moonlight by Egon Schiele 33 What Day Of The Month Is It ­ He Said Turning To Alice by Charles Robinson 38 Illustration For The Poem 'Two Crow' By Alexander Pushkin by Ivan Bilibin 39 Evening Landscape With Rising Moon by Vincent van Gogh 40 Tree And House by Amedeo Modigliani 42 Witch And Scarecrow In The Snow by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 43 The Art Lover by Eastman Johnson 44 Girl Wearing The Poppy Wreath by Orest Kiprensky 45 Sleeping Girl (Girl With A Cat) by PierreAuguste Renoir 49 Children With A Bird's Nest And Flowers by Angelica Kauffman 51 The Wave by Edvard Munch 55 Horse Frightened By A Storm by Eugene Delacroix 56

PHOTOSHOP MLF

Maternal Kiss by Mary Cassatt 33 Moon and Swan 50 Bar­be­que's Daughter with Klees' balloon 53 Kundalini 54 Man of Sorrows 59 Eat the Peach 66 ALL AT SEA 71

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EDITORS FOR THE ISSUE

MANAGING EDITOR Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick SENIOR EDITOR Bill West FICTION Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick Bill West

PHOTOGRAPHY Maia Cavelli WEB DATABASE Peter Gilkes Offices: Mullingar, Co. Westmeath, Ireland Motril, Granada, Andalusia, Spain Online Submissions: The Linnet´s Wings Web Design DDwebsites.org

POETRY Oonah Joslin SPANISH Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

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The Magpie on the Gallows by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

“A magpie, seeing some light­colored object conspicuous on the empty slope, flew closer to look. but all that lay there was a splintered peg and a twisted length of wire.” ― Richard Adams, Watership Down

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Spring Rewrite The air is warm and bright, And birds are tweeting tunes, In wind that writes of times Payed out under spying moon.

When silver was worth more than life, A traitor walked amongst his friends.

His plan was to incite strife: He fed on greed. Who'd comprehend His costly, oily scented swoon?

That still applies deceitful masks.

They add to tiers that bear down.

Affecting man’s underlying tasks: They mould a mood that suits a frown.

Tormenting folk in dreaded blasts; They guide the eye: to spin the clowns Who shout about this living hell, As they wallow in their own dark nouns.

But life’s a game: A living art And we awake each day and choose our mark.

MLF 2017

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Nobody is sleeping in the sky.

Nobody nobody. No one sleeps.

In a graveyard far off there is a corpse who has moaned for three years because of a dry countryside on his knee; and that boy they buried this morning cried so much it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful Federico García Lorca

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From time to time The clouds give rest To the moon-beholders.

Matsuo Bashō

Little Poems

Mystical Head, Alexej von Jawlensky

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STREET­ART­GRAFFITI, SANTURCE, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO

Calle Cerra Murals Calle Cerra runs for two blocks down the hill from Avenida Ponce de Leon in the Santurce area of San Juan, Puerto Rico. It passes through an old industrial area, now abandoned to rebellious art and edgy bars and restaurants. The blank walls of shuttered warehouses and vacated collision repair shops publish the works of some of the island’s brilliant artist-provocateurs in open-air visions of Puerto Rico’s past and future.

Stephen Zelnick, Emeritus Professor, Temple University

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Puerto Ricans cling to their fabled Amerindian origins as the island faces Anglo cleansing. Among the beloved Taino chieftains are two Caciquas, Yuisa (whose name is remembered in the municipality of Loiza) and Anacaona, a warrior princess of Dominica. Anacaona chose to be hanged rather than become a gift to a Spanish officer. Her defiance lingers as a mystical curse upon invaders.

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Eve’s allure persists, even in the tropics. Her fruitfulness is depicted here as menacing, apple-breasts emitting an ugly worm, as she reclines in sensuous promise.

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One-sixth of Puerto Rico’s residents are Afro-Boricuan. Enslaved Africans were transported to the island beginning in the second decade of the 16th Century to farm the land. This heritage remains in the beauty of its people and the rhythms of its music and dances. When I asked a Black child why the Spanish brought Africans to Puerto Rico, she answered “to teach them to dance Bomba”.

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Puerto Rico recalls its heritage of poor free farmers of the 19th Century. The artist Javier Cintron specializes in these images of the “Casitas”, a hard world without education, shoes, or facilities. This romanticized past images life without the depredations of the rich and colonizers with alien ways.

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These immense black and white figures appear on the wall of a decayed building of blighted grandeur. They offer a Dantean account of Puerto Rico’s grim history.

Two hollowed-eyed figures share a sad embrace. The trees are barren, in a colorless world, where they live in chains. Still, a patch of greenery appears alongside the man’s temple.

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This classic image of the Jibaro is provided, humorously, a muralist’s bucket and brush in place of his usual crude farm implements. He is the great-grandfather of the modern muralist, who also works in the heat of the sun for little pay but great satisfaction.

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“There are more worlds than one, and in many ways they are unlike each other. But joy and sorrow, or in other words, good and evil, are not absent in their degree from any of the worlds, for wherever there is life there is action, and action is but the expression of one or other of these qualities.”

James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales

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Faery

Still Life With Begonia, Alexej von Jawlensky

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Anna Pavlova (1882-1931), the celebrated Russian Balerina and Lavery's model, for both paintings, caused a sensation, with her 'Dance Bacchana'l from Pepita's ballet 'The Seasons,' which she danced in London for the first time in the summer of 1910. To advertise a second season at The Palace Theatre the following year, the editor of the Illustrated London News asked John Lavery to sketch her, he agreed, and she posed for him and he produced two full length portraits, 'The Red Scarf' and 'Le Mort de Cygne'

Lavery in 'Le Mort de Cygne' aimed to express the moving death of a beautiful creature. The ballerina sinks to the floor, the light dancing off her creamy white costume and pink satin pumps. It is a contemplative scene.

Leda and the Swan A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Above: Le Mort Du Cygne: Anna Pavlova by John Lavery Left: The Red Scarf by John Lavery “Somewhere in every one of us, no matter how deep it may be hidden, is a latent germ of beauty. ... We dance because this germ of beauty demands such expression, and the more we give it outlet the more we encourage our own instinct for graceful forms. It is by the steady elimination of everything which is ugly-thoughts and words no less than tangible objects-and by the substitution of things of true and lasting beauty that the whole progress of humanity proceeds.” Anna Pavlova

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

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Oisín's Mother (Sadhbh1 The Daughter of Boderg) An Irish Fairy Tale Edited by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick

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CHAPTER I

However they go in the day, Men will walk soberly in the evening and dogs will take the mood from their masters.

Evening

was drawing in and the Fianna decided to stop for the day. The hounds were whistled to heel, and a sober, homeward march began. The band was pacing through the soft, coloured dusk when suddenly a fawn leaped from cover and the air lit-up as dogs sprang forward, and a furious chase commenced.

Fionn mac Cumhail loved a chase. He loved the sound of the rustling grass that stretched to infinity, that moved and crept and swung under the breeze, he loved the line of the aloof, solitary trees that speckled the landscape and the way in which the occasional copse put-down its shadow. At any hour with his dogs, Bran and Sceo'lan, at his heels he could outstrip his troop until nothing remained but his own crystalline-world peopled with his hounds and their quarry, and in this evening’s air it was a nimble fawn that gave lead.

But even in his wildest moments Fionn was deliberate. There was nothing about the dogs that he didn't know, nothing that wasn't significant, that didn't matter to him; not a twitch or toss of the head, not a turn of the ear or tail. However on this chase he was lost. He had never seen such keen flight, the hounds were absorbed but they didn’t whine with eagerness nor cast a look in his direction for the supportive word. They glanced at him okay, but with a question and a statement in their deep-eyes. But he couldn't understand what they sought to convey.

Now

and ag'in, one of the dogs turned and stared, distantly, backwards, over the plain where their companions had disappeared.“Call it, a Vran!" he shouted, "Bark it out, a Heo'lan!"

They don't want the other dogs to hear or to follow, he murmured, and as his thoughts spilled, the dogs looked at him as if they knew or could read his mind. His mind: The fawn runs well. What is it, a Vran, my heart? After her, a Heo'lan! Up and away, my loves! There is more and to spare in that beast yet, she is not stretched to the full, nor half stretched. She may outrun even, you, Bran, he raged.

Again they looked at him, it was a look that he had never seen on a chase, as they continued to pull-away. To build silence-on-silence and speed-on-speed, until their lean, grey bodies were one with the motion as they all raced through the valley in a steady, speedy flight until suddenly, the fawn stopped and lay fearlessly on the grass. Fionn stared in astonishment. Crying out: 'You have her! go easy,' regretting the kill even as he undersood its nature.

But the dogs didn’t kill, they leaped and played about the fawn, licking its face, and rubbing delighted noses against its neck.

Fionn joined them: His spear lowered, his knife sheathed, and the fawn and the two hounds played round him; the fawn was as affectionate as the hounds were; so that when a velvet nose was thrust in his palm, it was as often as not a fawn's muzzle as a hound's.

It was in this company that he returned to his fort on Allen of Leinster, where the people were surprised to see the hounds and the fawn, and the Chief alone without the rest of the party that had setout with them, When the others reached home, Fionn told of his chase, and it was agreed that such a fawn must not be killed, but that it should be kept and well treated, and that it should be the pet fawn of the Fianna. But some of those who remembered Bran's parentage thought that as Bran herself had come from the Shi, this fawn might have come out of the Shi also.

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CHAPTER 11

The Lovely Lady from the Shi, Luminescent, with eyes like fawn.

She is the light on the foam.

This sky-woman of the dawn.

Perfumed as apple-blossom.

She smells of spice; she's a honeyed swan, My beloved, she is from beyond the world.

Late that night, when he was preparing for bed, Fionns' bedroom door slowly opened and a young woman entered the room. The Captain stared at her, he had never seen or imagined to see anything so beautiful. Indeed, she was not a woman, but a young girl with a bearing so noble that the chief scarcely dared look away believing that if he did she would disappear.

And as she stood within the doorway, smiling, shy as a flower, timid as a fawn, the Chief communed with his heart.

And that thought was delightful because she was such a sweet prospect and he was rueful because it was not yet realised, and might not be. As the dogs had looked at him on the chase with a look that he didn't understand, so she looked at him.

Quieting his heart, he said: "I don’t know you."

"You don’t! that's true." she replied.

"I should know every person that's here. What do you need from me?" he continued gently.

"I beg your protection, Royal Captain."

"I give that to all," he answered. "Against whom do you desire protection?"

"I am in terror of the Fear Doirche."

"The Dark Man of the Shi?" "He is my enemy," she said.

"He is mine now," said Fionn. "Tell me your story."

"My name is Sadhbh, and I am a woman of Faery," she commenced. "In the Shi' many men gave me their love, but I gave my love to no man of my country."

"That was not reasonable," the other chided with a blithe heart.

"I was contented," she replied, "and what we don’t want we don’t lack. But if my love went anywhere it went to a mortal, a man of the men of Ireland."

"By my hand," said Fionn in mortal distress, "I marvel at who that man might be!"

"He is known to you," she murmured. "I lived thus in the peace of Faery, hearing often of my mortal Champion, for the rumour of his great deeds had gone through the Shi', until a day came when the Black Magician put his eye on me, and, after that day, in whatever direction I looked I saw his eye."

She stopped at that, and the terror that was in her heart was on her face.

She whispered: "He is everywhere, He is in the bushes, And on the hill.

He looks up at me from the water, And he stares down on me from the sky.

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His voice commands me out of the spaces, And it demands secretly in the heart.

He is not here or there, He is in all time, in all places."

"I cannot escape from him," she said, "and I am afraid," and at that she wept noiselessly.

"He is my enemy, then too." Fionn growled. "I name him as my enemy."

"You will protect me?" she implored.

"Where I am let him not come," said Fionn. "I also have knowledge for I am Fionn, the son of Uail, the son of Baiscne, a man among men and a god where the gods are."

"He asked my hand in marriage," she continued, "but my mind was full of my own dear hero, and I refused the 'Dark Man'."

"That was your right, and I swear by my hand that if the man you desire is alive and unmarried he shall marry you or he will answer to me for the refusal."

"He is not married," said Sadhbh, "and you have small control over him." The Chief frowned thoughtfully. "Except the High King and the kings I have authority in this land."

"What man has authority over himself?" said Sadhbh.

"Do you mean that I am the man you seek?" asked Fionn.

"It is to yourself I gave my love." she replied.

"This is good news," Fionn cried joyfully, "for the moment you came through the door I loved and desired you, and the thought that you wished for another man went into my heart like a sword."

Indeed, Fionn loved Sadhbh as he had not loved a woman before and would never love one again.

He loved her as he had never loved anything before. He could not bear to be away from her. When he saw her he did not see the world, and when he saw the world without her it was as though he saw nothing, or as if he looked on a prospect that was bleak and depressing. The belling of a stag had been music to Fionn, but when Sadhbh spoke that was sound enough for him. He had loved to hear the cuckoo calling in the spring from the tree that is highest in the hedge, or the blackbird's jolly whistle in an autumn bush, or the thin, sweet enchantment that comes to the mind when a lark thrills out of sight in the air and the hushed fields listen to the song. But his wife's voice was sweeter to Fionn than the singing of a lark. She filled him with wonder and surmise. There was magic in the tips of her fingers. Her thin palm ravished him. Her slender foot set his heart beating; and whatever way her head moved there came a new shape of beauty to her face.

"She is always new," said Fionn. "She is always better than any other woman; she is always better than herself."

He attended no more to the Fianna. He ceased to hunt. He did not listen to the songs of poets or the curious sayings of magicians, for all of these were in his wife, and something that was beyond these was in her also.

"She is this world and the next one; she is completion," said Fionn.

CHAPTER III

The thunder blasted through the night, and lightning spotted ships--.

Ghostly ships from olden days had sails that billowed murderous tales.

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And men and women's screams were heard, as sheets of rain fell on life´s herd -Persistent rain fell in straight lines.

Its lines of light washed out the signs of dread.

It happened that the Men of Lochlann3 crossed the sea and came on a quest to conquer Ireland.

A monstrous fleet rounded the bluffs of Ben Edar4, and the Danes landed there, to prepare an attack which would render them masters of the country.

Fionn and the Fianna marched against them. Fionn didn't like the Men of Lochlann at any time, but this time he moved against them in wrath, for not only were they attacking his beloved , this time they had come between him and his lady; the deepest joy his life had known.

It was a hard fight, but a short one. The Lochlannachs6 were driven back to their ships, and within a week the only Danes remaining in Ireland were those that had been buried there.

Once finished, Fionn made ready to leave the victorious Fianna and return swiftly to the Plain of Allen, for he could not bear to be one unnecessary day parted from Sadhbh.

Goll mac Morna: "You're not leaving us!"

Fionn:"I must go."

Conan:"You will not desert the victory feast," Caelte: "Stay with us, Chief."

"What is a feast without Fionn?" they complained.

But he would not stay.

Fionn: "By my hand, I must go. She will be looking for me from the window."

Gol: "That will happen indeed."

Fionn: "That will happen and when she sees me far out on the plain, she will run through the great gate to meet me."

Cona'n: "It would be the queer wife that would neglect that run."

Fionn: "I shall hold her hand again," he whispered to Caelte's ear.

Caelte: "You will do that. Surely!"

Fionn:"I shall look into her face," his lord insisted. But he saw that not even beloved Caelte understood the meaning of that, and he knew sadly and yet proudly that what he meant could not be explained by anyone and could not be understood by anyone.

Caelte: "You are in love, dear heart."

"In love he is," Cona'n grumbled. "And what is it! but a cordial for women, a disease for men, and as a state a place of wretchedness."

"Wretched, it's true," the Chief murmured: "Love makes us poor.

We have not eyes enough, To see all that is to be seen, Nor hands enough to seize the tenth of all we want.

When I look in her eyes I am tormented, Because I am not looking at her lips, And when I see her lips my soul cries out, 'Look at her eyes, look at her eyes.'"

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"That is how it happens," said Goll.

"That way and no other," Caelte agreed.

And the Champions looked backwards in time on these lips and those, and they knew that their Chief would go.

When Fionn came in sight of the Great Keep his blood and his feet quickened. As he got closer to the Dún he waved his spear in the air. However there was no sign of Sadhbh: "She does not see me yet," he thought mournfully and then reproached himself saying: "She cannot see me yet." But his mind was troubled, for he felt that had the positions been changed he would have seen her at twice the distance. "She thinks that I've been unable to get away from the battle, or that I was forced to remain for the feast." And, with that, his mind rambled of its own accord and again he thought that had positions been changed he would have known that nothing could contain the one that was absent, yet still he made excuses. "Women," he said, "are shamefaced, they don't like to appear eager when others are observing them."

But he knew that he wouldn't have noticed if others were observing him, and that he wouldn't have cared about it if he had, and with that he knew that his Sadhbh would not have seen, and would not have cared for any eyes other than his. He gripped his spear on that reflection, and driven by dread he ran, as he had never run in his life, so that it was a panting, dishevelled man that raced heavily through the gates of the Great Dún5.

He was met with disorder. Servants were shouting to one another, and women were running to and fro aimlessly wringing their hands and screaming; and, when they saw the Champion, those nearest to him ran away, and there was a general effort on the part of every person to get behind, or to hide behind, every other person. But Fionn caught the eye of his butler, Gariv Crona'n, the Rough Buzzer, and held it.

"Come you here," he said.

And it was a subdued man that approached.

"Where is the Flower of Allen, where's Sadhbh?" his master demanded.

"I don't know, master," the terrified servant replied.

"You don't know!" exclaimed Fionn. "Well. Tell me please what you do know."

And the man told him this story.

CHAPTER IV

And he sang where sun lit settings found in dawn's old haze And he sighed as horrors lit in holy days, And on graves where pulpiteers had stood and spun From tomes the poems and stories long begun, In deathly sermons found in olden ways, As he saw her shadow lightly creep-- in daze.

"When you had been gone for a day the guards were on look-out, scanning the land from the heights of the Dún, and the Sadhbh was with them. She, for she had a quest's eye, suddenly called out that the master of the Fianna was coming over the ridges, the guards were surprised and caught unawares they watched as she ran from the keep to meet you."

"It was not I," said Fionn.

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"It bore your shape," replied Gariv Cronan. "It had your armour and your face, and the dogs, Bran and Sceo'lan, were with it."

"They were with me," said Fionn.

"Well they appeared to be with it," said the servant humbly.

"Tell us this tale," cried Fionn.

"We were distrustful," the servant continued. "We had never known Fionn to return from a combat before it had been fought, and we knew you could not have reached Ben Edar or encountered the Lochlannachs. So we caught with our lady and urged her to let us go out to meet you, but to remain herself in the Dún."

"It was good urging," Fionn assented.

"She would not be advised," the servant wailed. "She cried to us: 'Let me go to meet my love.'"

"Alas!" said Fionn.

"She cried on us: 'Let me go to meet my husband, the father of the child that is not born.'"

"Alas!" groaned deep-wounded Fionn.

"She ran towards your appearance, it had your arms stretched out to her."

At those words Fionn put his hand before his eyes, seeing all that happened.

"Tell on your tale," said he.

"She ran to those arms, and when she reached them the figure lifted its hand. It touched her with a hazel rod, and while we looked-on she disappeared, and in her stead, there was a fawn standing and shivering. The fawn turned and bounded towards the gate of the Dún, but the hounds that were standing by flew after her." The servant stared into Fionn's eyes as he drew the scene.

Like a lost man Fionn stared back at him.

"They took her by the throat--" the shivering servant whispered.

"Ah!" cried Fionn in a terrible voice.

"And they dragged her back to the figure that seemed to be Fionn. Three times she broke away and came bounding to us, and three times the dogs took her by the throat and dragged her back."

"You stood to look!" the Chief snarled.

"No, master, we ran, but she vanished as we got to her; the great hounds vanished away too, and that being that seemed to be you, master, disappeared with them. We were left in the rough grass, staring about us and at each other, and listening to the moan of the wind, and the terror of our hearts."

"Forgive us, sir," the servant cried.

But the great captain made him no answer. He stood as though he were dumb and blind, and now and again he beat terribly on his breast with his closed fist, as though he would kill that within him which should be dead and could not die. He went so, beating on his breast, and so retired to his inner room in the Dún, and he was not seen again for the rest of that day, nor until the sun rose over Moy Life in the morning.

CHAPTER V

He knew that he didn't know enough to mark-in-red the meaning of the words that he had heard and read.

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For many years after that time, when he was not fighting against the enemies of Ireland, Fionn was searching and hunting through the length and breadth of the country in the hope that he might again chance on his lovely lady from the Shi'. Through all that time, each night he slept in misery and each day he rose to grieve. Whenever he hunted he brought only the hounds that he trusted, Bran and Sceo'lan, Lomaire, Brod, and Lomlu; for if a fawn was chased each of these five great dogs would know if that was a fawn to be killed or one to be protected, and so there was small danger to Sadhbh and a small hope of finding her.

When seven years had passed in fruitless search, Fionn and the chief nobles of the Fianna were hunting Ben Gulbain. All the hounds of the Fianna were out, for Fionn had by now given up hope of encountering Sadhbh. Then as the hunt shimmied along the sides of the hill, a outcry of hounds swept down from a narrow place high-up on the slope, and then rising over the uproar there came the savage baying of Fionn's own dogs.

"What is this for?" said Fionn, and with his companions he pressed on to the spot whence the noise emanated.

"They are fighting. All the hounds of the Fianna are fighting." cried the Champion.

And they were. The five wise hounds were in a circle. They battled a hundred dogs at once.

Bristling and terrible: each bite from those great jaws was woe to the beast that received it. Nor did they fight in silence as was their custom and training, but between each onslaught the great heads were uplifted, and they pealed loudly, mournfully, urgently for their master.

"They are calling on me," Fionn roared.

And with that he ran as he had only once before, and the men who were near to him went racing, as they would not have run for their lives. They came to the narrow place on the slope of the mountain, and they saw the five great hounds in a circle fighting-off the other dogs, and in the middle of the ring a little boy stood.

He had long, beautiful hair, and he was naked. He was not daunted by the terrible combat and clamour of the hounds. In fact, he didn't even look at the hounds, but like a young prince he stared at Fionn and the Champions as they rushed towards him scattering the pack with the butts of their spears.

When the fight was over, Bran and Sceo'lan ran whining to the little boy and licked his hands.

"They do that to no one," said a bystander. "What new master is this they have found?"

Fionn bent to the boy. " Well my little prince, tell me your name and how you have come to be in the middle of a hunting-pack, and why are you naked?"

But the boy did not understand the language of the men of Ireland. So he put his hand into Fionn's, and the Chief felt as if that little hand had been put into his heart. He lifted the lad onto his great shoulder.

"We have caught something on this hunt," he said to Caelte mac Rongn. "We must bring this treasure home. You shall be one of the Fianna, my darling," he called upwards. The boy looked down on him, and in the noble trust and fearlessness of that regard Fionn's heart melted away.

"My little fawn!" he said.

And then he remembered that other fawn. Fionn set the boy between his knees and stared at him earnestly and long.

"There is surely the same look," he said to his awakening heart; "that is the very eye of Sadhbh."

The grief flooded out of his heart as at a stroke, and joy foamed into it, in one great tide. He marched back singing to the encampment, and men saw once more the Merry Chief they had almost forgotten.

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CHAPTER VI

Deeds grow old in a day and are buried in a night.

New memories come crowding and one must learn to forget as well as to remember.

Just as at one time he could not be parted from Sadhbh, so now he could not be separated from this boy. He had a thousand names for him, each one more tender than the last: My Fawn, My Pulse, My Secret Little Treasure, or he would call him: My Music, My Blossoming Branch, My Store in the Heart, My Soul. And the dogs were as wild for the boy as Fionn was. He could sit in safety among a pack that would have torn any man to pieces, and the reason was that Bran and Sceo'lan, with their three whelps, followed him about like shadows. When he was with the pack these five were with him, and woeful indeed was the eye they turned on their comrades when these pushed too closely or were not properly humble. They thrashed the pack severally and collectively until every hound in Fionn's kennels knew that the little lad was their master, and that there was nothing in the world so sacred as he was.

In no long time the five wise hounds could have given over their guardianship, so complete was the local recognition of their young lord. But they did not so give over, for it was not love they gave the lad but adoration.

Fionn even may have been embarrassed by their too close attendance. If he had been able to do so he might have spoken harshly to his dogs, but he could not; it was unthinkable that he should; and the boy might have spoken harshly to him if he had dared to do it. For this was the order of Fionn's affection: first there was the boy; next, Bran and Sceo'lan with their three whelps; then Caelte mac Rona'n, and from him down through the champions. He loved them all, but it was along that precedence his affections ran. The thorn that went into Bran's foot ran into Fionn's also. The world knew it, and there was not a Champion but admitted sorrowfully that there was reason for his love.

Little by little the boy came to understand their speech and to speak it himself, and at last he was able to tell his story to Fionn.

There were many blanks in the tale, for a young child does not remember very well. And a whole new life had come on this boy, a life that was instant and memorable, so that his present memories blended into and obscured the past, and he could not be sure if that which he told of had happened in this world or in the world he had left.

CHAPTER VII Oisín's Story

"I used to live," he said, "in a wide, beautiful place. There were hills and valleys there, and woods and streams, but in whatever direction I went I came always to a cliff, so tall it seemed to lean against the sky, and so straight that even a goat would not have imagined to climb it."

"I don't know of any such place," Fionn mused.

"There is no such place in Ireland," said Caelte, "but in the Shi' there is such a place."

"There is in truth," said Fionn.

"I used to eat fruits and roots in the summer," the boy continued, "but in the winter food was left

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for me in a cave."

"Was there no one with you?" Fionn asked.

"No one but a deer that loved me, and that I loved."

"Ah me!" cried Fionn in anguish, "tell me your tale, my son."

"A dark stern man often came after us, and he used to speak with the deer. Sometimes he talked gently, softly and coaxingly, but at times again he would shout loudly and in a harsh, angry voice. But whatever way he talked the deer would draw away from him, in dread, and he always left her at last furiously."

"It was the dark magician of the men of god," cried Fionn despairingly.

"It was indeed. My soul!" said Caelte.

"The last time I saw the deer," the child continued, "the dark man was speaking to her. He spoke for a long time. He spoke gently and angrily, gently and angrily, so that I thought he would never stop talking, but in the end he struck her with a hazel rod, so that she was forced to follow him when he went away. She was looking back at me all the time and crying so bitterly that any one would pity her. I tried to follow her also, but I could not move, and I cried after her, too, I cried with rage and grief until I could see and hear her no more. Then I fell on the grass, my senses left me, and when I awoke I was on the hill in the middle of the hounds where you found me."

That was the boy whom the Fianna called Oisi'n, or the Little Fawn. He grew to be a great fighter and he was the chief maker of poems in the world. But he was not yet finished with the Shi. He was to go back into Faery when the time came, and to come thence again to tell these tales, for it was by him these tales were told.

END

GLOSSARY Sadhbh1, Pronounced Sive. In Irish folklore Sadhbh was the daughter of Boderg and the wife/partner of Fionn mac Cumhail Eve2: Evening Men of Lochlann3 Raiders, most especially Vikings Ben Edair4: The Hill of Howth, in Dublin Dún5 Fort The Lochlannachs6 The Invaders Works Referenced: Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens

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A Distinguished Member Of The Humane Society/Edwin Henry Landseer

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“Fionn went out to carve a name for himself that will live while Time has an ear and knows an Irishman” James Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales

A Poem in a Revelation

Landschaftstudie ‐ Dorfstrasse, Alexej von Jawlensky

POETRY

Poetry Editorial: Oonah Joslin Happy Birthday Linnet's Wings When the map of life changes, when suddenly you find yourself in an unexpected place, ousted from your set course, evicted even from your own mind and you revert to being the ten-year-old you because the only way forward is to step back and out of time, it doesn't seem like a thing you'd ever celebrate. I was walking that landscape ten years ago.

Coincidentally, Marie, who now lives in Andalusia was starting "The Linnet's Wings" at the same time. I don't know whether Marie could see where she was going at that time. Did the Linnet start its journey from a lofty place or from a dark forest? Marie can answer that one!

What to do...what to do? My husband, seeing that I needed to be some-place-else, took me on holiday in February 2007 to Andalusia, now the home of The Linnet's Wings design office. I'd never been there before. When I got home, I wrote A trip to Tangiers which was later published in Bewildering Stories – appropriately enough for I was as bewildered as it is possible to get. (You can still read it in BwS) A poem about The Alhambra, written around the same holiday was published in The Shine Journal too and suddenly there was light and lift. You see, I was lucky. I'd found a safety net in the internet site www.writewords.org.uk. And it was there I first met Linnet's Wings friend and editor, Bill West who has been a linchpin in all that has happened in the past 10 years. He encouraged me when I was discouraged.

Life flows in ways we cannot imagine. Swept along in its current I found myself winner of the first ever MicroHorror prize that year and I went on win two more. I went to Baltimore. Later I became editor of Every Day Poets and met there my great friend, poet Kathleen Mickelson. I went to Minnesota. And some way along the road, when I was discouraged again, the Linnet caught up with me, as EDP folded and we became travelling companions. Maybe there is no such thing as coincidence.

Maybe Marie should answer that too – never underestimate Marie! Last year Marie published my book.

Kathleen was the editor. I had found the people who gave me wings.

I'm hoping to catch up with both Marie and Kath later this year but I have yet to meet Bill West.

How about it, Bill?

So...

When the map of life changes, when suddenly you find yourself in an unexpected place, ousted from your set course, evicted even from your own mind do not despair. It's just a new direction. Look back at who you were and who you wanted to be and look around you for the people who are waiting to give you wings.

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Pas de Deux for Marie This dance around each other skirted the stage at the beginning I full of sorrow and distrust caught in the internet of writing words that struck new found horror or new found shine into every day; a fiction of a life, lived for poetry.

But in our dance you lifted me, I lifted you, we parted, met again, choreographed the eddies of a common desire. To create some thing worthwhile and beautiful out of emptiness. Gathering music. Gathering magic.

Giving them wings. http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue275/trip_tangier.html http://www.theshinejournal.com/oonahjoslin.htm

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POETRY

I

nterior Spaces by Janet Reed

I once mapped my interior spaces, (made an atlas of my mind); confident in the legend I knew the roads and rivers where the scrub met Main Street and the highway left town.

Even the three stop lights in my three-stop town blinked predictably green.

Locked in a blind spot I couldn’t see the dark matter (negative space) that held my privilege, terrain I never knew to challenge until assault weapons splatted the canvas with bullets:

Charleston, Ferguson, Baltimore, Orlando, Dallas and Baton Rouge (to name a few).

Too many died before I saw a plat of social lines (the aerial view).

Because my skin is daylight I walk with the sun blinded to the syncopation of night.

I see red and green in harmony and ignore the combination that bleeds brown.

I bought a new canvas (to redraft)

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but couldn’t push a pencil, haunted by the speck and mote Jesus talked about (I was blind, but now I see).

Motes of comfort and inertia open highways wide with access (I don’t like to admit this) let me see the white fences around me and not the missing gates (blind spots).

(To say) “Do unto others” is not enough until I do unto others.

My new map requires (of me) serious road construction: wider roads, more exits, lights in negative spaces (renewable energies)

“In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, greenblue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers.

I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…”

-- Egon Schiele

Nude 1917 by Egon Schiele

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POETRY

Guadalupe of the Cupboard by Clare McCotter Altar piece in North Denver thirty five years without censure then a new governor slapped her in the cooler for distracting hearts and minds from the sacred sublime.

Our Lady of Guadalupe quarantined with mops and brushes has done more solitary than Steve McQueen.

Finding in the soft syncresis of her mestiza face something found no other place the threshers of golden grains Azteca horse breakers silver weavers black clay shapers called her Madre since she jaded the Altiplano’s winter skirt with quetzal song and dahlias for Juan Diego.

Steady in azure upper arm tattoos swinging from mirrors in battered Nissans she’s been with Los Mojados every step of the way from the border jumped at Tijuana to a forty seven foot mural banged up behind studs and laths and milk white plaster in a Coloradan chapel.

Talking straight the head honcho in the parish told them it was all about the boy the broad in blue had to walk leaving the cross a cameo square in snow casting no shadow on his own stone throne.

While Jesús sore and alone in night’s red heart stooping slips a note under her door.

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MLF PS 2017 (Maternal Kiss by Mary Cassatt)

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POETRY

Ellipsis (The Between) by Elizabeth Hitchcock Thursday night, when she discovered one week had passed in two seconds.

She pondered, scouring a cup in blue.

The moon dawned stiff.

In the window, the cat’s paws swung wide, seeking silent phantoms.

She couldn’t blame the teapot, bursting with pressure.

Circling black birds heralded another mourning.

The stove light lost its color.

Burned out or chilled by the open door.

She didn’t see the build-up, blinded watching flaked snowfall, waiting for invitations to lose in another white envelope.

The Gray Tree by Piet Mondrian

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Revenant by James Graham Memories do not age. How can it be that the Earth has gone around the Sun twenty-one times since this young day in Koblenz? She leans on a rail that overlooks the river, and sings: Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein. And says: ‘I love this place. Let’s walk along’.

An old man plays a concertina, does a little awkward dance; we put three marks in his sailor hat. We go hand in hand, and pause, and talk about the Lorelei, and Siegfried’s journey.

It is happening now, though she is gone…

I am here…but it folds away, and leaves the Sun and Moon to their cold arithmetic.

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POETRY

Emigration by Wendy Howe

( For Marian)

Crows cry louder this morning, perched in the chill.

Their chant heard from a hunched tree.

The wind gathers leaves in her skirt, her winter gust, and flings them toward the mountains.

They scatter like moths from a snuffed flame, words from a breathless prayer as a mourning dove lands near the chimney waiting for something to rise.

And in the garden, rosebuds cushion the briar with its prick of spare thorns.

My shadow stretches across the lawn -a thin swath of ice the sun and sorrow will thaw.

Illustration For The Poem 'Two Crow' By Alexander Pushkin by Ivan Bilibin

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In The Dark by Dolores Duggan The cat is crying to get out Into the back garden where his protein lies Dead under the deck.

A tiny bird in yellow But minus a few feathers.

The dog looks sad as I turn out the lights In my living room.

No one to pet her.

I think she’s afraid of the dark.

The red lamp stays on.

My room is dark and the crimson wall Shadow dances as the moonlight Seeps past the curtains.

I lock the door and cry.

I’m afraid of the light.

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POETRY

What Day Of The Month Is It - He Said Turning To Alice by Charles Robinson

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Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes ­ The sleep of reason produces monsters

Magnify by Lesley Timms You irritating little fly, A mere speck to my naked eye, Flitting in and out of sight, I’d squash you if you’d just alight!

Your curiosity astounds, No orifice is out of bounds!

Almost minced between my dentures; Sucked right in on nasal ventures, Up one nostril to my brain Then sneezed out to annoy again!

Manic flapping of my palm Is futile. You’re immune to harm!

You’re really screwing up my head.

Such a pest! I want you dead!

Intent on murder, yet I find A novel thought disturbs my mind: Though you’re expendable and wee, You’re skilfully outsmarting me!

Tiny. Insignificant.

Yet somehow so intelligent!

And what if I could magnify, To see each other, eye to eye?

What if I on close inspection Had to witness your perfection?

To gaze upon divinity, Sentience staring back at me.

Your humbling magnificence Might stifle my belligerence.

So, would I carry out my wish?

Could I nonchalantly squish?

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POETRY

Twenty‐Five by Robert Beveridge a birthday seizan In these days that we have chosen to walk this path together, you turn twenty-five. I could tell you, 'cause I've been there, that the new year will likely be a carbon copy of the old. But I at twenty-five was still a drunk, broke poet, barely getting by on others' generosity.

You are different, self-assured and with a sense of knowledge I still haven't found. So just look forward to the coming year. Instead of wisdom I don't have, I offer this: a quiet love, a promise I'll be here, when you have need of it.

The Art Lover by Eastman Johnson

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Hard Winter by Jim Hatfield Winter will be hard this year.

The wind is cold and Hazel said it tried to snow in Walsall yesterday.

Winter will be hard this year.

I feel this not because of any eye to nature’s signs; migrating birds Already on the wing, badgers hibernating early, that sort of thing But on the grounds that, after spring slipped in unannounced and Summer flounced in fits and starts, autumn took a stand; more grand And dramatic than seen for years.

Shropshire’s October has exploded. Like an everlasting firework display, The trees have teased, took weeks to drop their leaves which then were Gone within a day.

Winter will be hard this year, Skeletal oaks and maples seem to say.

Winter Landscape by Wassily Kandinsky

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POETRY

A Trullo Speaks by Maggie Mackay My chalky-grey stones, coned with snow, murmur melodies of folk songs within my walls, soaked into my pores.

Each row leans in, balanced like cake layers, whispers village gossip, Puglian spies.

From dawn ants march in sun-sizzle.

Green shoots creak through scorched earth.

Cool gravel crunches under trips of drunken feet, star-sparks fire laser pulses. Wrought-iron gates whine with the weight of stagger-swagger.

Blurred love-calls push against the breeze.

Car engines boom over chocolate fields, disturb snoring farmers and livestock.

Dogs snap mean across shadowy groves, leaf-drop echoes through shutters.

Bedded in black velvet, the hum of cosmic dust seduces. Souls of the beloved wait for you, just beyond sleep. Crickets offer prayers for them all night, insect monks, offering steady, patient presence.

The Sentimental Folk Song by Grant Wood

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Candescent by Wendy Howe (Thinking of Autumn and Brodsky.)

Leaves of the witch hazel linger golden on the branch giving light to the timbered dusk.

A tide of evening shadows filters in; and the hunter pauses remembering his house in a distant hour by the sea.

His woman sat near the window folding clothes, her hair illuming the glass without a lamp or moon.

Quietly, the waves rolled in with rain; and he sat quietly, too, loving how she lit -a small space in a cool, high-ceilinged room.

Witch And Scarecrow In The Snow by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

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POETRY

l(one)liness a leaf by Cordelia M. Hanemann space is shaped by the flight of birds the outer gray not quite fog wavers a single leaf in the garden shak es the astronauts hurl into the galactic night atmosphere parts at their arrival, closes on their going the crack in the earth's core out of which the hissing dragon breathes frac- tures the loud man (with the hair) insults everyone and everyone loves him for it sane people would never vote for him but in the world stranger things happen who owns the skyairearthgalactic night still the gray not quite fog hovers the last leaf falls….

Children With A Bird's Nest And Flowers/ Angelica Kauffman

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Northumberland by Harry Clarke These swoops of boulder and stiles and wild hideaway grass home glimmers and flickers of twisty old scribesmen.

Startling murmurations whip whirlpools of seed, piped into reels, jigged from sunrays, caught up in the riever’s song.

Mountainous figures clamber over shadows to the wooze of vowels, filling gaps between fences crashed over by Bunting.

Where the rhythm and skirl toe dance in season; and clouds lift their skirts, spinning past over skies, landing on a canvas of stars.

Girl Wearing The Poppy Wreath by Orest Kiprensky

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POETRY

Everything Under the Sun by Bob Beagrie "Like a thief I crept and entered a house, And it was my own home!" Rumi The wave's lip stammers sips dry sand kisses your toes swings back beneath the wings of sandpipers the next gathers its gift of dark distance in a French fold that breaks apart on the sandbank It is a breathing machine and sometimes it's the quiet voice that penetrates the din to enter the brain Imagine the angel (the best possible you) terribly unleashed from the tightrope of survival with sod all to lose or gain

Try counting the swells and your numbers will sink to roll rub and grind away their edges as sand grains realising the innumerable you on dry land you the gathering swell you the synchronised flock of sandpipers you the wind in their feathers the vast breathing machine the balanced wave you the crash the bubble, the sound of the first number held in the curl of a breaker.

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The Wave by Edvard Munch

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David Garrick, Angelica Kauffman

POETRY

Maria Anna Angelika Kauffmann RA (30 October 1741 – 5 November 1807), usually known in English as Angelica Kauffman, was a Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome. Remembered primarily as a history painter, Kauffmann was a skilled portraitist, landscape and decoration painter. She was one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768.

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Grotto of Peche Merle by Roberta Feins

The causse is dry & oaky, Stone-age painted caves beneath.

Pierced by a red arrow, Sorcerer, engorged, falls stiffly backward.

We wait above ground in front of steel gates protecting the darkness. Ahead in line

Enormous breasts define Women’s magical names

a newborn, soft head wisped with copper hair, nuzzles at her father’s chest.

the way black lines of haunch, smudged curve of ear define a horse.

At the bottom of the stairs the walls are limned with aurochs, reindeer, dots, arrows, stenciled handprints.

Red ochre ground from rock, charcoal, ash – powdered, mixed with rendered fat, blown or brushed.

There are horses sleeping in the rock, not yet coaxed forth by pigment.

Hanging from the ceiling, Roots explore the air seeking purchase on ground below.

Horse Frightened by a Storm by Eugene Delacroix

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POETRY

Pas de Deux by Cordelia M. Hanemann Thinking mutes performance; trust muscles’ intuitions: right leg glissés into fourth for the gentle plié—launch the pirouette, push of foot on floor; criss-crossed arms quicken the turn.

Invisible axis from earth’s center through the point of contact, upward: perfect body in perfect motion. One small shift and gravitational torque will topple her; supple body adjusts, uncanny intimacy: kinetics: force and counterforce, until the spent spin sinks smoothly back to earth—passage from heady whirl to the friction of the floor.

Fragile symmetry embraces earth’s implacable certitudes—earth itself, on its parallel dance, axis, has moved a mere one ten-trillionth of an atom’s width Moon and Swan/PS MLF/Date: 2017

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On the night of your leaving party by Trish Delaney

we had plans to stay out, to catch a morning pint and curl cigarette smoke in the corner snug of an early house, to practice our long distance chat but before the ecstasy snaked its final caustic trail down your throat, you gagged, and no water, were sick.

Detritus of youth pooling at my feet.

The doctors say there’s time.

I haven’t said goodbye — I don’t know can you ever come home after not breathing for three weeks on your own?

Through cloth-covered window and a lurching mess of limbs the early daylight hunted us down, singling you out as I backed away.

Strands of hair, slick across your face your body crumpled, coalescing with the contents of your stomach.

Flim Clip: Kundalini Awakening/PS MLF/2017

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POETRY

My Father, Blind Too Soon by Tom Sheehan Time whispered when he had eyes, a deliberation of things, songs, stories, a string of beads islander made in equatorial days; leaves, loaves, salad-making, great roasts’ sizzling songs, an unhurrying, yieldless time of games, ghosts, gobs of things.

How when sentences finally came to be, he read Cappy Ricks and the Green Pea Pirates, his eye on the page, my ear on his tongue, caesura was a bite of beer, a drink of cheese, turning words like the roasts he made, ever the savory succulent tongue, but gone page wordless now.

Now! Now! Now Time strikes!

Hurricanes, lightning, days are crunching, night is no longer a magician's pail of stars flung as sand on dark skies. The eyes are closed, the mouth; echoes so long old, when such songs cease their sounds.

Sprung from his loins wanting to be, self-torn from his arms at some piece of boyhood, I now remember earless, wordless, the touch when lovely young, and I know I roam forever in the darkness of his eyes.

Sotty, Ba-be-que's daughter with a Baloon/PS MLF/Date: 2017

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POETRY

Zero by Rp Verlaine Zero outside / sick in record snowfall / radio static spins schools are closed /no doubt I'm the victim of a freeze-out / due to her it's even colder / wind chill prospects have left zero chance to none or less with love / with her bereft of even a tear gone like the fall like she disappeared.

Zero outside / temperature gutted like me / in all of her mirage like lies recalled with a glacial; smile.

Knowing that if she asked I'd dance unmasked on all her trapdoors with a noose until one gives way or retracts or does anything that brings her to me And as frost covered windows threaten to crack / so do I Zero outside / sick in another drink / trying to decide if it's worth it all all this cold turkey crawl through love's withdrawal as chills, fever, sweat come in flashback succession

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amid rage and silent depression is the white noise of snow in this winter cold where she wont leave me whatever her intentions.

No, she hasn’t destroyed me let’s just saylike blood in snow she’s left a lasting impression.

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“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Between the Stories

Saviour's Face: Distant King ‐ Buddha II, Alexej von Jawlensky

CLASSIC

ULYSSES by

James Joyce CHAPTER ONE

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Man of Sorrows, PS, MLF 2017‐‐original painting Albrecht Durer ∙ 1493

s

tately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altari dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely: 'Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!'

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about

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and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head.

Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly.

'Back to barracks!' he said sternly. He added in a preacher's tone: 'For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.' He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Chrysostomos1. Two strong shrill whistles answered through the calm.

'Thanks, old chap,' he cried briskly. 'That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you?' He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages.

A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

'The mockery of it!' he said gaily. 'Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!' He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on. 'My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty quid?'

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried: 'Will he come? The jejune jesuit!'

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

'Tell me, Mulligan,' Stephen said quietly.

'Yes, my love?'

'How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?'

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

'God, isn't he dreadful?' he said frankly. 'A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you're not a gentleman.

God, these bloody English! Bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.'

He shaved warily over his chin.

'He was raving all night about a black panther,' Stephen said. 'Where is his guncase?'

'A woful lunatic!' Mulligan said. 'Were you in a funk?'

'I was,' Stephen said with energy and growing fear. 'Out here in the dark with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off.'

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

'Scutter!' he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper pocket, said: 'Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.'

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled

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handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.

Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said: 'The bard's noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can't you?'

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair oakpale hair stirring slightly.

'God!' he said quietly. 'Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea.

The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton.2 Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of Kingstown.3 'Our mighty mother! ' Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face.

'The aunt thinks you killed your mother,' he said. 'That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you.'

'Someone killed her,' Stephen said gloomily.

'You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you,' Buck Mulligan said. 'I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you ...' He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips.

'But a lovely mummer!4' he murmured to himself. 'Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all!'

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.

Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

'Ah, poor dogsbody!' he said in a kind voice. 'I must give you a shirt and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?5' 'They fit well enough,' Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

'The mockery of it,' he said contentedly. 'Secondleg they should be. God knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hairstripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You look damn well when you're dressed.'

'Thanks,' Stephen said. 'I can't wear them if they are grey.'

He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its smokeblue mobile eyes.

'That fellow I was with in the Ship last night,' said Buck Mulligan, 'says you have g.p.i. He's up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General paralysis of the insane!'

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad in sunlight now radiant on

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the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong wellknit trunk.

'Look at yourself,' he said, 'you dreadful bard!'

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. 'Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.'

'I pinched it out of the skivvy's room,' Buck Mulligan said. 'It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.'

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.

'The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror,' he said. 'If Wilde were only alive to see you!'

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness: 'It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.'

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them. 'It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it?' he said kindly. 'God knows you have more spirit than any of them.'

'Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The cold steelpen.'

'Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.'

Cranly's arm. His arm.

'And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I'll bring down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.'

Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. 'O, I shall expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die!'

With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade.

I don't want to be debagged! Don't you play the giddy ox with me!

Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.

'To ourselves ... new paganism ... omphalos.'

'Let him stay,' Stephen said. 'There's nothing wrong with him except at night.'

'Then what is it? ' Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. 'Cough it up. I'm quite frank with you.

What have you against me now?'

They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.

'Do you wish me to tell you?' he asked.

'Yes, what is it?' Buck Mulligan answered. 'I don't remember anything.'

He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes.

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Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said: 'Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's death?'

Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said: 'What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?' 'You were making tea,' Stephen said, 'and went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.'

'Yes?' Buck Mulligan said. 'What did I say? I forget.'

'You said,' Stephen answered, 'O, It's only Dedalus whose Mother is beastly dead.'

A flush, which made him seem younger and more engaging, rose to Buck Mulligan's cheek. ' Did I say that?' he asked. 'Well? What harm is that?'

He shook his constraint from him nervously.

'And what is death,' he asked, 'your mother's or yours or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it's injected the wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.'

He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly: 'I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.'

'Of what then?' Buck Mulligan asked.

'Of the offence to me,' Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.

'O, an impossible person!' he exclaimed.

He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks.

A voice within the tower called loudly: 'Are you up there, Mulligan?'

'I'm coming,' Buck Mulligan answered.

He turned towards Stephen and said: 'Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, Kinch, and come on down.

The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.'

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof: 'Don't mope over it all day,' he said. 'I'm inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding.'

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the stairhead: And no more turn aside and brood Upon love's bitter mystery For Fergus rules the brazen cars Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where

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he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet.

White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song:' I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.'

'Where now?'

Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang: I am the boy That can enjoy Invisibility Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

And no more turn aside and brood Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar, roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata Rutilantium te Confessorus Turma Circumdet: Iubilantium te Virginum Chorus Excipiat.6 Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

'Kinch ahoy!' Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again.

Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry, heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.

'Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is apologising for waking us last night. It's all right.'

'I'm coming,' Stephen said, turning.

'Do, for Jesus' sake,' Buck Mulligan said. 'For my sake and for all our sakes.'

His head disappeared and reappeared.

'I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.'

'I get paid this morning,' Stephen said.

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'The school kip?' Buck Mulligan said.' How much? Four quid? Lend us one.' ' If you want it,' Stephen said.

'Four shining sovereigns,' Buck Mulligan cried with delight. 'We'll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.'

He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of tune with a Cockney accent: O, won't we have a merry time, Dringing whisky, beer and wine!

On coronation, Coronaton Day! O, won't we have a merry time On Coronation Day! Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone, forgotten, on the parapet.

Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.

'We'll be choked,' Buck Mulligan said. 'Haines, open that door, will you?'

Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors.

'Have you the key?' a voice asked.

'Dedalus has it,' Buck Mulligan said. 'Janey Mack, I'm choked!'

He howled, without looking up from the fire: 'Kinch!'

'It's in the lock,' Stephen said, coming forward.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily and sighed with relief.

'I'm melting,' he said, as the candle remarked when ... 'But, hush! Not a word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.'

Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.

'What sort of a kip is this?' he said. 'I told her to come after eight.'

'We can drink it black,' Stephen said thirstily. 'There's a lemon in the locker.'

'O, damn you and your Paris fads!' Buck Mulligan said. 'I want Sandycove milk.'

Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly: 'That woman is coming up with the milk.'

'The blessings of God on you! 'Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his chair. 'Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.'

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Eat the Peach, PS, MLF 2017

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He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates, saying: 'In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.'

Haines sat down to pour out the tea.

'I'm giving you two lumps each,' he said. 'But, I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don't you?'

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's wheedling voice: 'When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water.'

'By Jove, it is tea,' Haines said.

Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling: 'So I do, Mrs Cahill, says she. Begob, Ma'am, says Mrs Cahill, God send you don't make them in the one pot.' He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled on his knife.

'That's folk,' he said very earnestly, 'for your book, Haines. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.'

He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows: 'Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?'

'I doubt it,' said Stephen gravely. ' Do you now?' Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. 'Your reasons, pray?'

'I fancy,' Stephen said as he ate, 'it did not exist in or out of the Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.' Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.

'Charming!' he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly. 'Do you think she was? Quite charming!'

Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf: For old Mary Ann She doesn't care a damn But, hising up her petticoats .

He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.

The doorway was darkened by an entering form.

'The milk, sir!'

'Come in, ma'am,' Mulligan said. 'Kinch, get the jug.'

An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow. 'That's a lovely morning, sir,' she said. 'Glory be to God.' 'To whom?' Mulligan said, glancing at her. 'Ah, to be sure!'

Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.

'The islanders,' Mulligan said to Haines casually, 'speak frequently of the collector of prepuces.'

'How much, sir?' asked the old woman.

'A quart,' Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old

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shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.

'It is indeed, ma'am,' Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

'Taste it, sir,' she said.

He drank at her bidding.

'If we could live on good food like that,' he said to her somewhat loudly, 'we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.'

'Are you a medical student, sir?' the old woman asked.

'I am, ma'am,'Buck Mulligan answered.

'Look at that now,' she said.

Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in God's likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

'Do you understand what he says?' Stephen asked her.

'Is it French you are talking, sir?' the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently. ' Irish,' Buck Mulligan said. 'Is there Gaelic on you?'

'I thought it was Irish,' she said, 'by the sound of it. Are you from the west, sir?'

'I am an Englishman,' Haines answered.

'He's English,' Buck Mulligan said, 'and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland.'

'Sure we ought to,' the old woman said, 'and I'm ashamed I don't speak the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.'

'Grand is no name for it,' said Buck Mulligan. 'Wonderful entirely. Fill us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am?'

'No, thank you, sir,' the old woman said, slipping the ring of the milkcan on her forearm and about to go.

Haines said to her: 'Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we?'

Stephen filled again the three cups.

'Bill, sir?' she said, halting. 'Well, it's seven mornings a pint at twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.'

Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his trouser pockets.

'Pay up and look pleasant,' Haines said to him, smiling.

Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his fingers and cried: 'A miracle!'

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

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'Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.'

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

'We'll owe twopence,' he said.

'Time enough, sir,' she said, taking the coin. 'Time enough. Good morning, sir.'

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant: Heart of my heart, were it more, More would be laid at your feet.

He turned to Stephen and said: 'Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty.'

'That reminds me,' Haines said, rising, 'that I have to visit your national library today.'

'Our swim first,' Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly: ' Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?'

Then he said to Haines: 'The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.'

'All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream,' Stephen said as he let honey trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke: ' I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.' ' Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit. Conscience. Yet here's a spot.'

'That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deuced good.'

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth of tone: 'Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.'

'Well, I mean it,' Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. 'I was just thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.'

'Would I make any money by it?' Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of the hammock, said: 'I don't know, I'm sure.'

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and said with coarse vigour: 'You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?'

'Well?' Stephen said. 'The problem is to get money. From whom? From the milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.'

'I blow him out about you,' Buck Mulligan said, 'and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.'

'I see little hope, 'Stephen said, 'from her or from him.'

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.

'From me, Kinch,' he said.

'In a suddenly changed tone' he added: 'To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let us get out of the kip.'

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying resignedly: 'Mulligan is stripped of his garments.'

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

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'There's your snotrag,' he said.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them, chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. 'God, we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green boots.

Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of his talking hands.'

'And there's your Latin quarter hat,' he said.

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the doorway: 'Are you coming, you fellows?'

'I'm ready,' Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. 'Come out, Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose.' Resigned he passed out with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow: 'And going forth he met Butterly.'

Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked: 'Did you bring the key?'

'I have it,' Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

'Down, sir! How dare you, sir!'

Haines asked: 'Do you pay rent for this tower?'

'Twelve quid,' Buck Mulligan said. ' To the secretary of state for war,' Stephen added over his shoulder.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last: 'Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?'

'Billy Pitt had them built,' Buck Mulligan said, 'when the French were on the sea. But ours is the omphalos.

'What is your idea of Hamlet?' Haines asked Stephen.

'No, no,' Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. 'I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas and the fifty-five reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I have a few pints in me first.'

He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat: 'You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?'

'It has waited so long,' Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

'You pique my curiosity,' Haines said amiably. 'Is it some paradox?'

'Pooh!' Buck Mulligan said. 'We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.'

'What? 'Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. 'He himself?'

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear: 'O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!'

'We're always tired in the morning,' Stephen said to Haines. 'And it is rather long to tell.'

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

'The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus,' he said.

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ALL AT SEA, MLF, PS 2017 'I mean to say,' Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. 'That beetles o'er his base into the sea, isn't it?'

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly. for an instant towards Stephen but did not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

'It's a wonderful tale,' Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent. The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail tacking by the Muglins.

'I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere,' he said bemused. 'The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.' Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had

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suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice: I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard My mother's a jew, my father's a bird With Josely the joiner I cannot agree So here's to disciples and calvary He held up a forefinger of warning.

If anyone thinks that I amn't divine He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine But have to drink water and wish it were plain That I make when the wine becomes water again

He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted: Goodbye, now goodbye! Write down all I said And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.

What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly And Olivet's breezy ... goodby, now , goodbye He capered before them down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said: 'We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?'

'The ballad of joking Jesus,' Stephen answered.

'O,' Haines said, 'you have heard it before?'

'Three times a day, after meals,' Stephen said drily.

'You're not a believer, are you?' Haines asked. 'I mean, a believer in the narrow sense of the word.

Creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God.' 'There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me,' Stephen said.

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

'Thank you,' Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

'Yes, of course,' he said, 'as they went on again. Either you believe or you don't, isn't it?

Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?'

'You behold in me,' Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferrule followed lightly

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on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.

'After all,' Haines began ...

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind.

'After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.'

'I am a servant of two masters,' Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

'Italian?' Haines said.

'A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.'

'And a third,' Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

'Italian?' Haines said again. 'What do you mean?'

'The imperial British state,' Stephen answered, his colour rising, 'and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.'

Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke.

'I can quite understand that,' he said calmly. 'An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.'

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: Et unam sanctan catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields.

'Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. Zut! Nom de Dieu'! Of course I'm a Britisher,' Haines's voice said, 'and I feel as one. I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.'

Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman.

'She's making for Bullock harbour.'

The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.

'There's five fathoms out there,' he said. 'It'll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today.'

The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite. Here I am.

They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.

'Is the brother with you, Malachi?'

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'Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.'

'Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.'

'Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.'

Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging loincloth.

Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips and breastbone.

Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.

'Ah, go to God!' Buck Mulligan said.

'Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?'

'Yes.' 'Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with money.'

'Is she up the pole?'

'Better ask Seymour that.'

'Seymour a bleeding officer!' Buck Mulligan said.

He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying tritely: 'Redheaded women buck like goats.'

He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.

'My twelfth rib is gone,' he cried. 'I'm the UBERMENSCH. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen.'

He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his clothes lay.

'Are you going in here, Malachi?'

'Yes. Make room in the bed.'

The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a stone, smoking.

'Are you not coming in? 'Buck Mulligan asked.

'Later on,' Haines said. 'Not on my breakfast.'

Stephen turned away.

'I'm going,' Mulligan, he said.

'Give us that key, Kinch,' Buck Mulligan said, 'to keep my chemise flat.'

'Stephen handed him the key.' Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes.

'And twopence,' he said, for a pint. 'Throw it there.'

Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly: 'He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake Zarathustra.'

His plump body plunged.

'We'll see you again,' Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the path and smiling at wild Irish.

'Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.'

'The Ship,' Buck Mulligan cried. 'Half twelve.'

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'Good,' Stephen said.

He walked along the upwardcurving path.

LILIATA RUTILANTIUM. TURMA CIRCUMDET. IUBILANTIUM TE VIRGINUM.

The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight.

Home also I cannot go.

A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seal's, far out on the water, round.

Usurper.

*******

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GLOSSARY 1 Chrysostomos (Greek: ρυσooτομος, "golden mouthed" from chrysos, Xpυσoς, "golden"; stoma, στομa, "mouth") was a common epithet for orators.

2 Epi oinopa ponton translates to 'upon the wine-dark sea' 3 Kingstown: Dún Laoghaire is a suburban seaside town in County Dublin, Ireland 4 mummer: An actor in a traditional masked mime or a mummers' play. (OED 2017 ) 5 breeks: another term for breeches OED 2017 ) 6 ‘Liliata Rutilantium te Confessorus Turma Circumdet: Iubilantium te Virginum Chorus Excipiat.’ translates to (“May the troop of confessors, glowing like lilies, surround you. May the choir of virgins, jubilant, take you in”) 7. Jalap, a laxative drug OED 2017 8. Janey Mac is widely used in Ireland as a euphemism for Jesus Christ: Also see rhyme-- Janey Mac me shirt is black,/What'll I do for Sunday?/Go to bed and cover your head,/ And don't get up till Monday

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“It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Honey and Smoke

Still Life With Bottle, Bread And Red Wallpaper With Swallows, Alexej von Jawlensky

TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY

Tongues of Fire: Puerto Rican Poets between Empires

Stephen Zelnick, Emeritus Professor, Temple University

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Puerto Rico, smallest of the Taino Caribbean islands, was claimed by Spain in the late 15th C. and since 1898 has been a colony of the United States. Cuba, the largest, emerged from subjugation in the Castro revolution of 1959. Dominica (Dominican Republic and Haiti) are independent, but crippled by poverty and politics. Despite cosmetic efforts, Puerto Rico is a colony, without control of its trade and shipping, and without rights other than those the US grants.

In 1898 – 1917, the period of transition from Spanish to US dominance, three Puerto Rican poet/statesmen documented the flow of thought and emotion as one empire collapsed and another tightened its grip. They were fine poets, but also political leaders, founding political parties, publishing essays sounding the patriotic alarm, and expressing the growing anger of a people robbed of its sovereignty, economic viability, culture, and dignity.

Jose de Diego (1866 – 1918) was born and educated on the island. Like many privileged young men, he went to Spain for advanced education and there began his career as a poet. Spain was divided between monarchists and liberals urging Spain to join in the democratic waves sweeping Europe. His early poetry, politically radical and anti-religious, earned him prison time in Madrid.

De Diego’s “Laura” (1889) and several lyrical poems are well known. In 1916 he published Cantos de Ribeldia, a book-length meditation on Caribbean history. De Diego is a race poet, celebrating his people and their culture, just as their Spanish masters passed them on to strangers. De Diego was raised in the traditions of Catholic Spain. Spanish was his language, and Spanish writers formed him. Until 1898, he was a Spanish citizen, working to secure greater freedoms within the declining Empire. In Cantos de Rebeldia, he identifies the destiny of Puerto Rico with the rebirth of Spanish grandeur.

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY

[pic] [Jose de Diego worked tirelessly for Puerto Rican independence – first as co-founder of the Autonomy Movement, seeking self-government; then, after the US acquisition of the island, in founding the independence Party. De Diego, once hopeful of the island’s obtaining the rights of US citizens, soon discarded that notion and advocated instead a political alliance of the nations of the Greater Antilles.]

«Tierra !»

En el pecho clamoroso del profundo bombardino hay acentos modulados de la lengua castellana y en la flauta y en la lira vibradora y en el trino y en el bronce palpitante de la cóncava campana.

In the clamorous chest of the deep tuba, there are modulated accents of the Castillian tongue; It vibrates in the flute and lyre and in the trill and pulsing bronze of the concave bell.

Y el idioma en que Teresa adoró al Verbo Divino, en que oyeron los espacios las estrofas de Quintana; la mirífica palabra que a los cielos dio el Marino, anunciando el nacimiento de la tierra americana...

The idiom in which Teresa adored the divine Word, in which they heard Quintana’s strophes; the marvelous word that Mariner spoke to the heavens announcing the birth of the American land…

Esta lengua que los Siglos y la Musa de la Historia, resonante on epopeyas, han cumiado y han escrito, con eternas harmonías, en la cumbre de la gloria...

This tongue of the centuries and History’s muse, resonating in epics, they gathered and wrote, with eternal harmonies, at glory’s height…

Morir puede sobre el suelo de la madre raza iberica, pero no en el Nuevo Mundo, porque encierra el primer grito El primer grandioso grito de la aparición de América!

The Iberian mother-race can die, but not in the New World whose first shout was Spanish, the first bellowing cry of the American spirit.

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[pic] [Ponce de Leon became governor of Puerto Rico in 1508. He was among the 200 gentlemen accompanying Columbus on his second voyage, most seeking easy riches. He became an explorer of note, attempting to establish a Spanish settlement in Florida, where he was mortally wounded by native peoples in 1521. This idealized portrait bears little resemblance to any contemporary picture.]

De Diego often figures the harmonizing of being and nature, history and destiny, Old World and New as music. He celebrates the magical word – “Tierra!” – that Columbus heard announcing the birth of a New World. Although the “mother-race” is dying, an American world is being born, speaking Spanish.

“Tierra” is a classic sonnet, with perfect rhymes and rhythms. These “cantos” – chants or songs – are meant for public presentation, avoiding wit and complexity. They range across the centuries, from heaven’s purposes to history’s unfolding. The poem proposes a bold idea, that Spanish culture, reborn in America, recaptures energies lost to the Old World. Few of de Diego’s cantos are so formally conventional. The themes require more flamboyant expression and flexible forms. (from) Profecías

Prophecies

La intensa luz de sus pupilas de águila tendió el vate filósofo a la orilla del Mar Tirrene, en cuyo fondo gime la eterna gloria de la edad antigua, y, contemplando a Córcega en silencio, dejó esta hermosa profecía escrita: —«Tengo el presentimiento de que al mundo ha de asombrar esta pequeña Isla».

With intensity of an eagle’s eyes, Rousseau, the visionary, casts his gaze at the shore of the Tyrrene Sea -- at whose foundation tugs the eternal glory of the antique age -and contemplating Corsica in silence, he left this beautiful written prophecy: “I have the premonition the world will be amazed at this small island”.

******** Yo también, como el sabio de Ginebra,

I, too, like the sage of Geneva,

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY siento una voz providencial divina, Patria mía infeliz... ¡Oh, dulce Patria, cuna y sepulcro de la raza india, paraíso perdido entre las olas, ideal apagado entre las brisas! ¡tú has de salir de tu profundo sueño, para asombrar al Universo un día!

sense a providential voice divine, My unlucky homeland… Oh, sweet homeland, cradle and grave of the indian race, lost paradise among the waves, exhausted ideal wafting in soft breezes! you will awaken from your deep dreaming, to amaze the universe one day!

******** ¡Dios redentor, en los espacios libres, tiene una estrella para cada isla!

God the redeemer, in space’s vastness, maintains a star for each island!

Rousseau anticipates Napoleon arising from Corsica to shake the world from its feudal past. Puerto Rico’s history has been nothing but defeat and humiliation --“grave of the Indian race,/ lost paradise among the waves.” Yet history’s cycles are unexpected, God maintains “a star for each island.” At this moment, Puerto Ricans are lulled by island breezes, but will awaken to amaze the universe.

“Ante la Historia”, formed by linked sonnets, is bitter and ironic. Supposedly, native peoples were subdued by the cross, but the sword was always present. We celebrate the Conquistadores, but the Indians were left sobbing. Now we await modernity and Constitutional rights, only to find subjugation and hypocrisy:

[pic] [This sculpture honoring Taino ancestors is usually associated with the Cacique (chieftain) Agüeybana, who led his people in their bold effort to repel the Conquistadores in 1511.]

ANTE LA HISTORIA

Before History

Lanzó el cacique belicoso grito, al avanzar de la española quilla, pero dobló indefenso la rodilla la Cruz del Redentor bendito.

The Cacique launched a war-like shout, at the advance of the Spanish keel, but bent the knee defenseless to the blessing of the Redeemer’s Cross.

Y en las propias murallas de granito que alzó a su ilustre pabellón Castilla, hoy la bandera americana brilla, como un fragmento azul del Infinito.

And in their own walls of granite where Castile raised a lustrous pavilion, today the American banner shines, like a blue fragment of infinity.

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¿Bajó el ciclo a la tierra borinqueña? ¡Ay, la gloriosa insignia iluminada entre sombríos ámbitos domeña!

Y, como el indio ante la cruz sagrada, se inclina el pueblo, ante la noble enseña puesta, como la cruz, sobre la espada... *** Con ellos vino el arma vencedora, la fuerza, la conquista, el vasallaje...

El derecho no salta al abordaje, la ley se asusta todo la mar traidora...

Did this cycle reach to Boricua?

Ay, the glorious shining ensign Rules with its ambitious dreams!

And, like the Indian before the sacred cross, the people bow down, before the noble ensign placed, like a cross, above the sword…

Aquella gran Constitución, aurora, de un siglo, cual de un mundo, es un celaje; brilla en su cielo, flota en su paisaje, pero encerrada en su paisaje llora...

That grand Constitution, the dawn of a century, sign of the new world; shines in its heaven, floats free in its domain, but imprisons its weeping dominions…

¡Llora!... Sobre sus tablas ofendidas, el Aguila se eleva soberana con el rayo en las garras encendidas...

Shed tears!... Over its offended lands the Eagle hovers aloft superb, with lightning in its burning claws…

¡Llora, porque es la Libertad humana! y Llora por las colonias oprimidas, si es libertad y si es americana!

Shed tears, because this is human Liberty, and weep for the oppressed colonies; this is liberty, American style!

With them came the victorious army, the force, the conquest, the vassalage…

Justice no longer leaps aboard; law itself is now affrighted, all over the traitorous seas…

For Puerto Ricans between the stale grandeur of Catholic Spain and the false promises of US Constitutionalism there is little to choose. Like their Taino forefathers, Puerto Ricans again “bent the knee defenseless” to their redeemers. The beguiling ensign hides a murderous sword. And now arrives a predator, Constitution in one razor-claw and murderous lightning in the other. Boricuans embrace the signs of liberty – either Catholic or Liberal – only to suffer lawlessness and defeat. Written a century ago, de Diego’s scorching sonnets describe the century to come. [pic] [US Marines invaded Puerto Rico’s southwestern coast on July 25, 1898 and quickly occupied the city of Ponce. General Miles announced his pacific intentions: “We have come to promote your prosperity, and to bestow upon you the immunities and blessings of the liberal institutions of our government.”]

In 1898, US marines established a military occupation. The island was quickly sold to the US by Spain as

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY a war settlement. The US installed a governor unacquainted with Puerto Rico but loyal to US business interests. Official documents referred to the new possession as “Porto Rico”. All education was to be in English. The US restricted trade, advancing the interests of US importers of Brazilian coffee, sugar corporations, and tobacco interests. Island merchants were unable to transport their produce to Europe and were blocked out of the US market. The devaluation of Puerto Rico’s currency added significantly to farmers’ miseries, forced to sell their lands to US purchasers at devalued prices.

“Himno a America” is the most ambitious of the cantos. This is de Diego’s homage to Bolivarian thinking. Simon Bolivar (1783 – 1830) proposed a pan-Hispanic Latin America, formed as a bulwark against Europe and the growing threat of the United States. Bolivar had witnessed Spain’s defeat at Napoleon’s hands, and the rapid fall of the French Republic. Europe’s instability encouraged him to envision Latin American nations – Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia – united to command their destiny. This dream included uniting Caribbean island nations, and reviving the Taino’s lost paradise. De Diego’s hymn describes a world to come, drawing upon aboriginal memory, reviving the decayed brilliance of Spain, advancing God’s plan to favor the new and pure, and the natural grandeur of the New World.

In “Himno a America” light emerges from Stygian darkness, as in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and mythical beasts clash in titanic conflict. Great condors rise from the Andean valleys to confront the predatory eagles of the thirteen colonies, Dominicans battle Conquistadores, bloody Cuba remains unbowed, while Boricua, island of harmony, holds the center. Spain is revived in the warm sunshine of western skies with its faith, confidence, and the pulse of life renewed. [pic] [The walls of Santurce in San Juan are decorated with brilliant murals. This one celebrates the oppositional power of the arts.]

The poem is nearly 300 lines long, with irregular stanzas, capturing mood shifts. Prose passages mock US bureaucracy. The tapestry is vast, encompassing centuries, journeys from bright heaven to Stygian gloom, fabulous beasts and historical figures, Taino mysteries and Christian rites, “from the battle’s trenches to the altars of prayer”, and the expansive metaphors that link human and cosmic scales. It begins with epic reach, recalling Paradise Lost: Cuando el Planeta se abre en pedazos y se derrumban montes y sierras a cañonazos; cuando entre cielos, mares y tierras Satán agita sobre los pueblos enloquecidos; sus rojos brazos; vos, en la cumbre del Globo, indemne vos, de nuestra América bajo la egida,

When the planet breaks apart in pieces and hurls mountains and hills down to the canyons; when among skies, seas and lands Satan roils the maddened people; their red arms; you, at the height of the globe, undamaged from our America under the aegis,

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alzáis el magno verbo solemne you might shout the great solemn word que repercute por los confines como una ráfaga de amor y vida. that resounds through the heavens like a squall of love and life.

Por el divino genio que expande, By the divine genius that expands as from como de un núcleo cósmico en génesis, la raza ibérica a cosmic nucleus at birth, the Iberian race fue para el cielo dos veces gran was twice blessed by heaven and for the World y para el Mundo que en duple esfuerzo se completaba con nuestra América. that in double force was perfected in America. ***There follows a catalogue of nations and their duress: Esa Cruz tiende un brazo de Hércules a la angustia cubana esa Cruz tiende un brazo de ángel a la fe borincana, es de Ojeda, Velázquez y Ponce en tierras y mar, de Caonabo, de Hatuey, de Agüeybana...

India, española, cristiana! ¡Sirve lo mismo para una trinchera que para un altar! ¡Cruz redentora dominicana! ¡Cruz encendida sobre el Baluarte! ¡Cruz del acero que esgrimió Duarte! ¡Cruz Antillana!

Borinquen sola la gracia espera del brazo angélico que forma parte de tu bandera, y si no puedes aquí elevarte por la plegaria, por el derecho ni por el arte, ni en la victoria de una trinchera... ¡ven a posarte sobre las tumbas en que mi Patria luchando muera!

This Cross offered Hercules’ arm to Cuban anguish, and tendered an angel’s arm to Boricuan faith, from Ojeda, Velazquez and Ponce on land and sea from Caonabo, Haiti, Agüeybana…

Indian, Spanish, Christian!

Serves as a trench in war and an altar in prayer!

The Cross redeems Dominica!

A Flaming Cross over Baluarte!

The Iron Cross Duarte wielded!

Cross of the Antilles!

Boricua alone, the gracious hope of the angelic arm that forms part of your banner, and if you cannot raise it here by prayer, by right, by art, nor in victory in the trenches of war… come and place it over the tombs in which my battling homeland perishes!

***Satan appears, with his ravaging eagles terrorizing the peace of the Antilles: Con siete vueltas cercando a Europa ruge el Estigio, In seven turns Stygian dark roars, enclosing Europe, y el magno verbo que en el fastigio and the great word that the south wind collects del Capitolio recoge el austro, difunde el bóreas, within the Capitol’s fastness, disperses the north, envuelve ¡oh Prócer! vuestro prestigio sheltering, oh great one, your prestige y va cantando de polo a polo con el prodigio and goes singing, pole to pole, with the wonder del resonante vuelo invisible de vuestras Águilas incorpóreas. of the resounding flight invisible of your incorporeal eagles.

De vuestras Águilas... Una de ellas, que tuvo el vértigo de la altura, precipitada de las estrellas cayó en la sombra, perdió su espíritu, tornóse oscura.

Of your eagles… one of them that had the highest standing, cast down from the stars fell in shadow, lost its spirit, turned dark.

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY Águila negra de alma de cuervo, rapaz y torva, de pico acerbo, de garra corva, en cada pueblo libre de América tendría un siervo y así el destino y el rumbo estorba de las potentes águilas líricas de vuestro verbo...

Black Eagle from the soul of a raven, rapacious and fierce, with sharp beak, and curved claws, sent to each American free people a servant loyal to the fate and deadly course of the mighty fabled eagles of your word…

***His emissaries speak in soothing tones, all the better to plunder the islands: «Los Estados de América no son rivales hostiles, sino amigos que cooperan juntos, y el progresivo concepto de la comunidad de sus intereses, lo mismo en cuestiones políticas que económicas, puede darles una nueva significación como factores en asuntos internacionales y en la historia política del Mundo. Esto es panamericanismo. No tiene un espíritu imperialista. Es la encarnación, la encarnación efectiva del espíritu de la ley, la independencia, la libertad y el mutuo servicio.»

“The states of America are not hostile rivals but friends who should cooperate in the progressive concept of mutual interests, both in political matters and economic, to give us a new purpose as agents in international affairs and in the political history of the world. This is pan-Americanism. It does not have an imperialist spirit. It is the incarnation, the effective incarnation of the spirit of the law, independence, liberty, and mutual service.”

Palabras dulces y armoniosas, Sweet and harmonious words, like breezes como las brisas que pasan ledas entre los cálices de las rosas... that pass merrily between the rosebuds… ¿encierran un arrepentimiento are they wrapped in repentance o solo tienen, como las brisas, risas de viento? or are they only, like the breezes, the wind’s laughter?

[ [ ( i a t

pic] Lady Liberty brings Freedom to the Caribbean, to Cuba, Porto Rico sic) and the Philippines. As in most cartoons of the period, the nhabitants are Black, but in this unusual depiction, dignified and ttractive. Tio Samuel, rocks back at his ease, enjoying his pipe, the asks of war accomplished.]

***Spain, weakened and decrepit can offer no resistance: Y con las doce nítidas Águilas de intensa albura que se atrevieron contra el magnífico León hispano, inerme entonces por la impotencia de su bravura

And with twelve spotless Eagles of intense white that challenged the magnificent Spanish lion, unarmed therefore by impotence

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entre las olas del Océano, among the ocean waves, la negra Águila imperialista, the black imperialist Eagle, de los combates ya el fin cercano, of combats already nearly complete, fue a la conquista went to the conquest, and with its y con sus alas nubló una punta de aquel lucero, wings shrouded the point of light, que era el espíritu genetliaco del invencible pueblo cubano. the in-born spirit of the invincible Cubans.

Y ¡oh, mi Cordero!

And oh, my Lamb! ¡santo Cordero de la parábola del Bautista!

Sacred Lamb of the Baptist’s parable! ¡santo Cordero que acompañaste al León de España Sacred Lamb who accompanied the Lion of Spain hasta el postrero unto the very end, día terrible de la hecatombe de la campaña, the terrible day of the hecatomb of the countryside, por débil eras la única víctima propiciatoria by weakness you were the lone propitiatory victim ¡y fue tu entraña and it was your entrails He scattered, el desgarrado, único, rojo girón sangriento de la victoria! the red hero, bloody in his victory!

***But history, with God’s guiding hand, will take its turn empowered by the power of justice and the brave indignation of its people: Hay un poeta, Cordero, a tus plantas, que tiene una lira There is a poet, Lamb, at your feet y esa lira suspira who holds a lyre that breathes tu cándido amor: your truthful love:

si tu dolor una vez la desata y estira… ¡el monstruo verá cual relumbra en los aires de ira una espada que ha sido una lira de amor y dolor!

if your pain once unravels and expands … the monster will see what shimmers in the air of hatred, a sword fashioned from a lyre of love and grief!

***Hispania is triumphant in the New World: En el pináculo del mundo entonces, At the pinnacle of the world then radiará América sus ideales, America will spread its ideals, no cual la efigie de duras piedras y fríos bronces not like the effigy of hard rocks and cold bronzes sobre la roca chata y minúscula de una bahía, over the flat minuscule rock of a bay, sino viviente, con el aliento omnipoderoso but living, with the all-powerful breath que en el espacio diera el Coloso that will give the Collosus space de las ocultas profundidades del núcleo eterno de la Energía. from the hidden depths of the eternal nucleus of Energy.

Y, en el concierto de sus Naciones, dichosa y libre se elevaría,

And in concert of its Nations, happy and free, there will arise

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY

templo de todas las religiones, a temple of all religions, fuente de toda sabiduría, a fount of all wisdom, amor de todos los corazones, love from all hearts, hogar abierto para el proscrito, an open house for the rejected, ¡faro bendito, a blessed beacon, guiando el cruce por el Planeta de las futuras generaciones guiding the cross throughout the Planet of future generations y el del Planeta por los misterios iluminados del Infinito! enlightened by the mysteries of the Infinite!

Jose de Diego died in 1918, having witnessed the harsh grip the US maintained on his island and the shrewd gift of incomplete citizenship conferred upon his people to enlist them for the trenches of WWI. The rebellion de Diego imagined has surfaced, but fitfully. The Philippines met US power and plunder with guerilla force; Cuba challenged the dark eagle and won; but Puerto Rico, for all its suffering, has remained the good child of de Diego’s hymn. Still, prophecies have no expiration date.

Luis Munoz Rivera (1859-1916), a tough-minded journalist and politician, battled for liberal opportunities within monarchical Spain. Munoz Rivera worked to establish legal and commercial rights for the island’s business community. His plan went into effect just as the US initiated its war against Spain -- in the words of President McKinley, a war to take “all we can get… and keep what we want.”

[pic]

[Luis Munoz Rivera urged the island to adopt a middle course between capitulation and independence from Spain and later the US. He died in 1916, shortly after delivering a sharp rebuke to the US Congress for its false offer of citizenship. Luis Munoz Marin, the island’s first elected governor was his son.]

Munoz Rivera suffered for his realism. In the 1890s, he supported the island’s commercial and plantation elite, the only politically functional group in a society mostly rural, 85% illiterate, and given to irregular habits. Rivera’s associations bred distrust among his radical Autonomy colleagues. After the US invasion, many radicals expected economic equality: in their excitement, they attacked land-owners and merchants, Munoz Rivera counseled restraint, and for his pains had his newspaper offices and his home torched. Following threats to his person and family, he moved to New York City. A decade later he was selected to serve as the island’s representative to the US Congress. The title “Resident Commissioner” persists to this day, as does the humiliation of attending Congress but having no vote.

Munoz Rivera was sharp-witted and direct. When in 1914 the US proposed a limited form of citizenship for Puerto Ricans, Munoz Rivera responded on the floor of the US Congress: “if you wish to make us

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citizens of an inferior class; if we cannot be one of your States; if we cannot be a country of our own then we will have to be perpetually a colony, a dependency of the United States. Is that the kind of citizenship you offer us? Then that is the citizenship we refuse.” His poetry shows Munoz Rivera was not a man to be deceived.

HIMNO Aceptareis, patriotas, inerte vuestra mano la esclavitud abyecta, la servidumbre vil? ¿No veis cómo el tirano azota a nuestro pueblo juzgándole servil?

Will you accept, patriots, with limp hand, abject slavery, vile servitude?

Don’t you see how the tyrant thrashes our people, seeing you servile?

La patria estaba muda; la patria estaba muerta; el déspota la hería con bárbara crueldad: la patria se despierta y a nuestros brazos fía su sacra dignidad.

Our native land was mute; was dead; the despot wounded it with barbarous cruelty: Our native land awakens and entrusts its sacred dignity to our arms.

¿Vivir bajo la punta del látigo extranjero? ¿Llorar en el oprobio y en la abyección gemir? no, no: vibre el acero; volemos, ciudadanos, volemos a morir.

To live under blows of the foreign lash?

Weep in disgrace and moan in wretchedness?

No, no: shake your steel; we will strike back, citizens, strike back to the death.

¡Al arma, hijos del Plata! Cabezas de verdugos exige nuestra tierra: herid sin compasión.

Así se rompen yugos! y donde fue la tribu se forja la nación.

To arms, sons of silver! Demand the heads of the slave-drivers; wound without compassion.

That way break your yokes! and where there was the tribe, forge the nation.

“Minha Terra”, however, sounds a different note, Munoz Rivera’s disgust at his countrymen’s timidity:

[pic] [The shield of Puerto Rico shows the heritage of Castile, with its castles, golden heraldry, and the rampant lion. In the center reclines the Lamb of Christ with a Christian banner. The legend reads “In the name of John”, a reference to John, the Baptist, the patron saint of Puerto Rico, as in San Juan.]

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY MINHA TERRA Borinquen, pobre cautiva del mar que sus costas bate; garza dormida entre brumas como en lecho de azahares, no vio nunca en sus collados el humo de los combates, ni el somatén en sus villas, ni el tumulto en sus ciudades.

Boricua, poor captive of the sea that batters both its coasts; heron dozing among mists as if upon a bed of lillies, I see nothing in its hills of the smoke of combat no uproar in its villages, nor tumult in its cities.

Borinquen, la pobre tierra de las angustias tenaces, de las danzas gemidores, y de los tristes cantares, no vengó, loca de furia como una virgen salvaje las equimosis del látigo, las cicatrices del sable.

Boricua, poor land of stubborn anguish, of lamentable dances, and sad songs, never avenging, in mad fury like a savage virgen, the bruises of the lash, the scars of the sabre.

Borinquen tiene en su escudo un peñasco entre dos mares y un cordero solitario con un pálido estandarte.

Boricua has on its shield a rocky crag between two seas and one lonely lamb with a pale banner.

Símbolo fiel de su historia que, a través de las edades, no escribió jamás en rojas tintas el nombre de un mártir.

A faithful symbol of its history in which throughout the ages, no one ever inscribed in blood-red tints the name of a single martyr.

Borinquen, la cenicienta, no puede romper su cárcel, porque faltan, ¡vive Cristo!, mucho nervio en su carácter, mucho plomo en sus colinas y mucho acero en sus valles, porque en sus campos no hay pueblo; porque en sus venas no hay sangre.

Boricua, the Cinderella, could not break its cage, because it lacks, Christ almighty, much nerve in its character, much lead in its hills, and much steel in its valleys, because in its fields there are no people; because in their veins there is no blood.

Luis Llorens Torres (1878 – 1944) was also a rebellious child of Spain. Born to a family of plantation owners, he rejected convention to find himself in poetry. He was a successful lawyer and was among the founders in 1912 of the Independence Party, the first to demand the island’s independence. Llorens Torres was more bohemian than active politician, his poetry more attuned to nature and to tangled web of

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affection and Eros. “Cancion de las Antillas” (1913; rev. 1929) celebrates the bounty of the Caribbean and its lush beauty. Unlike de Diego’s epic “Hymn”, Llorens Torres praises the land’s fertility, its lush forests and warm seas, with a painter’s eye and savage senses. But by 1929, much of this had also become a paradise lost to colonialism and its destructiveness.

[pic] [Llorens Torres is more justly recognized as a poet than as a political leader. He is best remembered for his great out-pouring of poetry, some of it erotic, some political, but all of it accomplished.]

From “Cancion de Antilles” ¡Somos ricas! Los dulces cañaverales, Grama de nuestros vergeles, Son panales De áureas mieles.

We are rich! Sweet fields of sugar-cane, the grass of our orchards, are honeycombs of golden riches.

Los cafetales frondosos, Amorosos, Paren granos abundantes y olorosos, Para el cansado viajero Brinda sombra y pan y agua el cocotero.

The luxuriant coffee plantations so beloved, yield abundant and fragrant beans; the coconut palm, greets the tired traveler with shade, bread and water.

Y es incienso perfumante Del hogar El aroma hipnotizante Del lozano tabacar– otros mares guardan perlas En la sangre del coral de sus entrañas.

And the perfumed incense of home is the hypnotic aroma of lush tobacco fields – other seas store pearls in the blood-coral of their wombs.

Otras tierras dan diamantes del carbón de sus montañas.

De otros climas son las lanas, los vinos y los cereales.

Berlín brinda con cerveza. Paris brinda con champan.

China borda los mantones orientales.

Y Sevilla los dobleces de la capa de Don Juan. ¿Y nosotras?... De tabacos y de mieles, Repletos nuestros bajeles Siempre van. .

In other lands mountains yield diamonds.

From other climes wool, wine and cereals.

Berlin toasts with beer; Paris with champagne.

China sews oriental shawls, And Seville the folds of Don Juan’s cape.

And we? Our ships go out always full Of tobacco and of honey,

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY ¡Mieles y humo! Legaciones perfumadas.

Honey and smoke! Our perfumed legations, Por la miel y por el humo nos conocen en Paris y en Estambul.

Well known in Paris and Istanbul.

[pic] {[This lovely rendering of a Taino-Black woman was painted by Samuel Lind, a present-day artist from Loiza.

This is a celestial face, and now that Lind has painted it, one sees it on the island every day.]

¡Somos indias! Indias bravas, libres, rudas, Y desnudas, Y trigueñas por el sol ecuatorial.

Indias del indio bohío Del pomarrosal sombrío De las orillas del rio De la selva tropical.

Los Agüeybanas y Hatueyes, Los caciques, nuestros reyes, No ciñeron más corona Que las plumas de la garza auricolor.

Y la dulce nuestra reina Anacaona, La poetisa de la voz de ruiseñor, La del césped por alfombra soberana Y por palio el palio inmenso de los cielos de tisú, No tuvo más señorío Que una hamaca bajo el ala de un bohío Y un bohío bajo el ala de un bambú.

We are Indians! Brave, free, tough, and naked, wheat brown from the equatorial sun.

Indians of the native bohio of shady orchard of the river’s banks, of the tropical forest.

The Agüeybanas y Hatueyes, the caciques, our kings, crowned with no more than gold-tinged heron plumes.

And our sweet queen Anacaona, poet with voice of the nightingale, she of the regal carpet of lawn under the immense canopy of heavenly tissue, had no more sign of royalty than a hammock hung beneath the bohio’s eave, the bohio tucked under the bamboo’s wing.

¡Somos bellas! Bellas a la luz del día Y más bellas a la noche por el ósculo lunar.

Hemos toda la poesía De los cielos, de la tierra y de la mar: En los cielos, los rosales florecidos de la aurora que el azul dormido bordan de capullos carmesíes

We are beauty! The beauty of day-break, and more at night by the shadowy moon.

We are all the poetry of skies, earth and sea: in the skies, rose bushes bloom at dawn, as the slumbering blue embroiders the turquois bell

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en la cóncava turquesa del espacio que se enciende y se colora of space, with carmine buds lit como en sangre de rubíes: with the blood of rubies: en las mares, la gran gema de esmeralda que se esfuma In the seas, the great emerald gem fades como un viso del encaje de la espuma like a vision in the mist’s mosaic bajo el velo vaporoso de la bruma: beneath the vaporous film of spray: y en los bosques, los crujientes pentagramas and in the forests, on those five-lined staffs, bajo claves de orquídeas tropicales, under the clef signs of tropical orchids, los crujientes pentagramas de las ramas staffs formed by the branches where donde duermen como notas los zorzales… thrushes sleep, like notes of the scale..

Todas, todas las bellezas de los cielos, de la tierra y de la mar, All this beauty of sky, land, and sea, our Nuestras aves las contemplan en las raudas perspectivas de sus vuelos, birds view in their swift flights, Nuestros bardos las enhebran en el hilo de la while bards thread the needle, luz de su cantar. lit by their singing.

Llorens Torres asks, “we Puerto Ricans, who are we?”

A PUERTO RICO

To Puerto Rico

La América fue tuya. Fue tuya en la corona embrujada de plumas del cacique Agüeybana, que traía el misterio de una noche de siglos y quemóse en el rayo de sol de una mañana.

America was yours. Yours in the bewitched crown of plumes of the cacique Agüeybana, who brought the mystery of a night from centuries and burned himself in the sun’s ray one morning.

El África fue tuya. Fue tuya en las esclavas que el surco roturaron, al sol canicular.

Tenían la piel negra y España les dio un beso y las volvió criollas de luz crepuscular.

Africa was yours. Yours in the slaves who turned the furrow, in mid-summer heat.

They have black skin and Spain gave them a kiss and turned them creole in the twi-light.

También fue tuya España. Y fue San Juan la joya, que aquella madre vieja y madre todavía, prendió de tu recuerdo como un brillante al aire

Also Spain was yours. And San Juan the jewel, that mother of old and still our mother, hung from your memory like a brilliant gem in air

sobre el aro de oro que ciñe la bahía. over the golden ring that encircles the bay. ¿Y el Yanki de alto cuerpo y alma infantil quizás?... And the Yankee of tall body and infantile soul?... ¡El Yanki no fue tuyo ni lo será jamás!

The Yankee was not yours and never will be!

The island’s destiny is in rebellion, not in armed violence, but stubborn persistence armed by god’s truth and justice – and songs written in tongues of fire: El pueblo inerme que sumiso calla, lanza, al fin, su protesta poderosa, como la oscura nube silenciosa, llena de estruendo y luz, se abre y estalla.

The people unarmed who rise up quietly, heave, at last, their heavy protest, like a dark silent cloud, filled with thunder and light, that rips open and explodes.

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TRANSLATIONS AND ESSAY Surge el blanco adalid: rompe la valla: valley: sus plantas de ángel en el suelo posa, y es rayo la palabra victoriosa que ilumina su campo de batalla.

The white champion surges forward, tearing the their angel footprints set down in the soil it is the ray of the word victorious that illuminates its field of battle.

¡Así el genio inmortal se transfigura y, de la patria en el amado infierno, canta en lenguas de fuego sus dolores!

So the immortal genius is transformed and, from the homeland in the beloved inferno, sings its pains in tongues of fire!

¡Rebeldía sublime de la altura!... ¡Luzbel hermoso, impenitente, eterno, cercado, como Dios, de resplandores!

Rebellion sublime from on high!...

Brilliant beauty, impenitent, eternal, surrounded, like God, with splendors!

All Translations: Stephen Zelnick

Works Used: De Diego, Jose. Cantos de Rebeldía. Editorial Cordillera: San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1966.

Denis, Nelson A. War Against All Puerto Ricans. Nation Books, 2015.

Fernandez, Ronald. The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century. Praeger Publishers, 1996.

Fernández, Ronald; Serafín Méndez and Gail Cueto. Puerto Rico: Past and Present. Greenwood Press, 1998.

Llorens Torres, Luis. Obra Poética. Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2010.

Munoz Rivera, Luis. www.los-poetas.com/m/luis.htm Naipaul, V. S. The Loss of El Dorado. Vintage, 1969.

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