Mass in Dublin

Weary winds, a conjuring cajoled from Cashel, work witchery on St.Stephen's Green;
Wail, whisper, twist, tumble the fumbling jumble of furious fog living in familiar furrow;
Fling grainy gray tear drops of mist with penitent's petulant propulsion.
Torrents of Dubliners surge driven, desperate storm-tide, towards Irish banks;
Cascading; roaring; wending and washing over workaday pavement and pauper
Blazoned with fresh burnished vigor over long vanquished victims' malaise.
Mushrooming umbrellas bloom busily above boot black business suits;
Pock, puff up, and loll the lanes laden with the bone and marrow of the Liffey.
Grafton gravamen; Celtic certainty; Patrick's patina wolfishly worn on icy O'ysters
carefully caressing lascivious laptops; suckling cellulars to eager EUroticised ears;
Clucking, clicking, marching miasma, animated, afire with phantasm phone friends;
Forty-ish faces fixed on fair future, processing paradise, computing cloying comfort.
Pugnacious Peugeots fume parallel to pedestrian path, pining to participate;
Saabs sigh.
Babel of Baile Átha Cliath, jangling juices of Joyce joylessly, touting toothless Trinity;
Goodness, Guinness, Georgian geometry, beery bogs, punts, pubs, savants
in sepulchers.

Improbable prophet perilously propped on penury's prow parsing on
rosary-rutted fingers, leprous lethargy, while willy-nilly his wicker
wheelchair, woman piloted, passes Pearse.
Leathery feathery lily-stem neck nods, bobs, trills and throbs, gurgling
gales of Glorias.
Soft scapular on softer scapula; garrote of grace vested; inviting
vermilion veins;
Draws daggers of disdain to flash unabashed; unheeded through rheumy
retinas.
Paschal pair tussled, tossed by turbid turbulent dross, cleave to
courageous currach.
Artless artifice, hallowed humanity, sailing single-minded, Nassau now
to navigate; Wicklow's waves shortly; sweet scent of a Carmel's clasp in
accustomed alley allures.
Credo's comfort, Suscipiat's sustenance, Agnus, Absolvo; ancient
sanguine Sacrifice.
Benighted beggars faithfully following careful compass beyond bounds of
Bogmen;
vivisecting visionaries, patrician pirates; quavering quid notes
sounding howling hooli.
Noon noticed, bells bong, thickened throng, regulated roar rises as
riptide around
timorous time; eternal tether; vicious indifference, intemperate
vivacity;
surround, seethe.
Ardent altars, afire for lithe lambs, devoutly devour devotees; banish
banal blemish.
Cutthroat, throat cut, driven, drool, hollow, heather, difference decided
by single stroke.

- Written July 1998 as the author witnessed a wheelchairbound man and
his female companion working their way through the noon crowds near St.
Stephen's Green to get to Mass. -

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Biography

"Liam Ronan" is the nom de plume for Joseph Behe, Jr. An administrative law judge specialising in child and elder abuse hearings for the Commonwealth of Pennyslvania, he retired in March 1999 and moved to Cahermuckee West Cork. Born in 1949, he took a degree in Literature from the Harrisburg Community College, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with subsequent studies in abnormal psychology and child psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. At present "Liam" is writing a novel centered on life in the West of Cork. His interests are chiefly related to writing poetry and prose; and, inhaling the works of Flannery O'Connor, A.S. Pushkin, Mikhail Sholokov; and, James Joyce.