"Gas from a Burner"
by James Joyce, 1912
Ladies and gents, you are here assembled
To hear why earth and heaven trembled
Because of the black and sinister arts
Of an Irish writer in foreign parts.
He sent me a book ten years ago
I read it a hundred times or so,
Backwards and forwards, down and up,
Through both the ends of a telescope.
I printed it all to the very last word
But by the mercy of the Lord
The darkness of my mind was rent
And I saw the writer's foul intent.
But I owe a duty to Ireland:
I held her honour in my hand,
This lovely land that always sent
Her writers and artists to banishment
And in a spirit of Irish fun
Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.
'Twas Irish humour, wet and dry,
Flung quicklime into Parnell's eye;
'Tis Irish brains that save from doom
The leaky barge of the Bishop of Rome
For everyone knows the Pope can't belch
Without the consent of Billy Walsh.
O Ireland my first and only love
Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove!
O lovely land where the shamrock grows!
(Allow me, ladies, to blow my nose)
To show you for strictures I don't care a button
I printed the poems of Mountainy Mutton
And a play he wrote (you've read it I'm sure)
Where they talk of bastard, bugger and whore
And a play on the Word and Holy Paul
And some woman's legs that I can't recall
Written by Moore, a genuine gent
That lives on his property's ten per cent:
I printed mystical books in dozens:
I printed the table-book of Cousins
Though (asking your pardon) as for the verse
'Twould give you a heartburn on your arse:
I printed folklore from North and South
By Gregory of the Golden Mouth:
I printed poets, sad, silly and solemn:
I printed Patrick What-do-you-Colm:
I printed the great John Milicent Synge
Who soars above on an angel's wing
In the playboy shift that he pinched as swag
From Maunsel's manager's travelling-bag.
But I draw the line at that bloody fellow
That was over here dressed in Austrian yellow,
Spouting Italian by the hour
To O'Leary Curtis and John Wyse Power
And writing of Dublin, dirty and dear,
In a manner no blackamoor printer could bear.
Shite and onions! Do you think I'll print
The name of the Wellington Monument,
Sydney Parade and Sandymount tram,
Downes's cakeshop and Williams's jam?
I'm damned if I do--I'm damned to blazes!
Talk about Irish Names of Places!
It's a wonder to me, upon my soul,
He forgot to mention Curly's Hole.
No, ladies, my press shall have no share in
So gross a libel on Stepmother Erin.
I pity the poor--that's why I took
A red-headed Scotchman to keep my book.
Poor sister Scotland! Her doom is fell;
She cannot find any more Stuarts to sell.
My conscience is fine as Chinese silk:
My heart is as soft as buttermilk.
Colm can tell you I made a rebate
Of one hundred pounds on the estimate
I gave him for his Irish Review.
I love my country--by herrings I do!
I wish you could see what tears I weep
When I think of the emigrant train and ship.
That's why I publish far and wide
My quite illegible railway guide,
In the porch of my printing institute
The poor and deserving prostitute
Plays every night at catch-as-catch-can
With her tight-breeched British artilleryman
And the foreigner learns the gift of the gab
From the drunken draggletail Dublin drab.
Who was it said: Resist not evil?
I'll burn that book, so help me devil.
I'll sing a psalm as I watch it burn
And the ashes I'll keep in a one-handled urn.
I'll penance do with farts and groans
Kneeling upon my marrowbones.
This very next lent I will unbare
My penitent buttocks to the air
And sobbing beside my printing press
My awful sin I will confess.
My Irish foreman from Bannockburn
Shall dip his right hand in the urn
And sign crisscross with reverent thumb
Memento homo upon my bum.
Under Construction
by Roger Cummiskey 1998.
I am genius I am Joyce.
A Dubliner of some renown
Hated, reviled, admired;
Poet and critic.
Ten years I had to wait for
Dubliners to be published
For pittance
Because I’m genius
Because I’m Joyce.
Yes, James Jaysas Joyce.
A Portrait helped,
Years and years to complete Ulysses
The greatest daytime novel of all time.
Teaching English as a foreign language
In Trieste and Zurich.
Patronized by a woman of Faith
Though I had none, Harriet Weaver.
Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare in Paris
My office, my Publisher
And Nora my model, inseparable;
Hemingway carried me over his shoulder
Drunk, we sang, argued, danced,
Played the piano and guitar.
Dublin, my town, 1904 my year
And 16th June my day;
But all wanted to know, in their
Ignorance if they featured,
And did they what.
They suffered for their lack of faith
In James Jaysas Joyce
Because I’m genius because I’m Joyce.
Mine eyes are a bitch
I’ve moved and moved
Borrowed and borrowed
Written and written.
Blind Homer helped the plot
And Ibsen influenced
So did Gogarty ha! ha!
Beckett learned.
Wild geese abroad.
Bloom was Israelite
One for Molly.
Budgen my pal.
Chamber Music and Pomes Penyeach
Kept debtors at bay.
Then the greatest night time novel
Of all time got out of the Traps.
Anna Livia Plurabelle and H.C.Earwicker
Thought their way through the night
Towards the sea
Work in Progress.
Tim Finnegan had lived at Watling Street
Twins Shaun and Shem come into their own.
Because I’m genius because I’m Joyce.
Yes, James Jaysas Joyce.
© 1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2021.
AUTHOR: ROGER CUMMISKEY, 1998
CONSTRUCTION UPDATES: JANUARY 2000, SEPTEMBER, 2000, APRIL 2002, JANUARY 2004 January 2021
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FOR BLOOMSDAY 1998 BY THE IRISH TIMES NEWSPAPER.
Love loves to love Love.
She Weeps over Rahoon
by James Joyce. Trieste 1913
This is a poem written by James Joyce, as he was not too certain, at the time, whether his woman (later his wife), Nora Barnacle, still carried a gra for Michael Foley whom she had known in Galway before she met Joyce.
Michael died young and is buried in Rahoon cemetery in Galway.©
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,
Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.
Love, hear thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.
Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould
And muttering rain.
Trieste, 1913.©
ref: P94
Is Love Really in the Air?
by Roger Cummiskey
Love, I love you
I really love you
I really, really love you
I said I love you
Of course I love you
Sure, I love you
Believe me, I love you
Definitely, I love you
Yes, I love you
But, …do you love me?
© 2001
Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
Alone
by James Joyce, 1916, Zurich
The moon's greygolden meshes make
All night a veil,
The shorelamps in the sleeping lake
Laburnum tendrils trail.
The sly reeds whisper to the night
A name-- her name-
And all my soul is a delight,
A swoon of shame.
Zurich 1916 ©
P109
Ecce Puer - It´s a Boy
By James Joyce
Shakespeare and Company, Paris, first published Pomes Penyeach, by James Joyce, in 1927. An American, Sylvia Beach, who was also a patron of Joyce, owned this publishing business and the book shop in the Rue d’Odeon in Paris. She was also the first publisher of Ulysses.
I have painted a series of Joyce’s poems in watercolours using waterproof ink. Each poem is acknowledged from the time that it was written.
Joyce wrote Ecce Puer in 1932 after the death of his father, John Joyce. James was guilt ridden for not having responded to his father’s request for him to visit Ireland before the old man died. The poem also celebrates the birth of his grandson Stephen James Joyce on February 15th 1932. Stephen is still alive and well and living in Paris. It is a very sad and poignant poem. ©
P104
Ecce Puer (It’s a Boy)
Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
1932.©
They lived and laughed and loved and left.
A Painting of a Young Poet:
by Roger Cummiskey
Bury me in the old church-yard
The bell! The bell! Farewell! Farewell!
O, we got a good breath of ozone round the Head today
A thimbleful, just to whet your appetite, they say.
In the silence, pick, pack, pock, puck.
Blackrock, Stillorgan, Goatstown, Dundrum and Sandyford
Carrickmines, Stradbrook, no more battles on the rocks.
They would meet quietly as if they had known each other
And made their tryst in some more secret place.
He would fade into something impalpable
Under her eyes and then in a moment he would be transfigured.
Christian brothers be damned
Newman and Byron
The telegraphpoles held the galloping notes
Of music between the punctual bars.
The sunlight breaking suddenly on his sight
Turned the sky and clouds into a fantastic world
Of sombre masses with lakelike spaces of dark rosy light.
He wanted to sin with another of his kind
A cry for an iniquitous abandonment.
In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk
Into a tawny glow.
What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world
If he suffer the loss of his immortal soul?
His soul was fattening and congealing into a gross grease
Grazing out of darkened eyes, helpless, perturbed and human
For a bovine god to stare upon.
It would rain forever, noiselessly
All life would be choked off, noiselessly.
Noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world.
Lucifer, non serviam: I will not serve.
Time is, time was, but time shall be no more!
The greatest torment, poena damni, the pain of loss.
Ever, never; ever, never.
The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J.
His destiny was to be elusive of social and religious orders.
Destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others
To learn the wisdom of others wandering among the snares of the world.
A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
Words, was it their colours?
No, the poise and balance of the period itself.
Stephaneforos. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create
A living thing, new and soaring and beautiful,
Impalpable, imperishable.
He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted
The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence,
Low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep;
Hither and thither, hither and thither;
A faint flame trembled on her cheek.
I hope I am not detaining you
A flaming bloody sugar.
This race and this country and this life
Produced me. I shall express myself as I am.
Yellow insolence.
Art is the human disposition of sensible or
Intelligible matter for an esthetic end.
A soft liquid joy, the soft space of silent spaces
Of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through
The seadusk over the flowing waters.
The stout student who stood below farted briefly.
Did an angel speak?
I’m a ballocks.
I am and I know I am And I admit that I am.
Darkness falls from the air
Brightness falls from the air.
I will not serve
My defense
Silence, exile and cunning.
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience.
Compiled from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce).
by Roger Cummiskey
I 
Comments
Post a Comment