The Christian Brothers’ spire soared high, ripping through the passing clouds and he thought about the priest that had rented the room near his and how he used to say the spire was an arm reaching into Heaven. From the second story, he watched as the familiar shadow fell over the graves on North Richmond Street. The darkness still reached across the ground, now looking more like an “X” than a cross, with its passionate afternoon stretch over the rows of stone markers that later would ebb with the moon.
Placed just outside the Gates, a sinking ground empty filled—or so they said. They teased with their reaching hands; they believed in the wine and the broken bread, or so they should, they read. One man looked back on this street and resurrected the sunken faces, inflating them just a bit more with a still-dreary Dublin breath. Revived with only sighs of despair, sadness draped in heavy death.
As a boy, James Joyce lived with anguish just outside his window. Lives prematurely cut by their owners, the devil grabbing each one of them by the ankles as they try to climb up, cluttered his childhood panorama. What a better way to clear all the clutter than to give some of those nameless stone markers names like Doyle and Gabriel. Eveline doesn’t kill herself because she feels trapped in a male dominated world; she chooses her own life over following another. Sure they might be resurrected into a mundane world, but they are still there—living—every time someone reads their stories. Forever discussed in the present tense— ironically immortal. ~G
