By Kathleen McCoy

“We rarely hear ‘truth and reconciliation’—just ‘truth and justice.'”
—David Park, author of The Truth Commissioner

On this wall tick your childhood and mine, your loves
    and mine, your regrets, cacophonies of memory

and harmonies in your ear, coagulations of unuttered grief,
    relentless news from a grittier Belfast, our cousins

going at each other in the streets, Molotov cocktails and hurled
    rocks. Rifles. Truth without whisper of reconciliation.

But this is not the Belfast we have read about. Now the streets
    are clean, the bricks new. Twenty-seven percent check

the “no religion” box. Yet boxes there still be. With Barry’s tea
    I toast a thing that is not a thing, a thought that is not

singular beneath rolling gray clouds that siphon the self,
    that challenge perception, angle and taste, domesticity,

violence, numinousness. Dozens of clocks stand at attention,
    unseeing eyes fixed on the observer, no two declaring

the same time. None advance; all compel stares: one moon-
    faced grandfather clock painted blue, grannies’ broken

clocks, wooden clocks with cats or hens or roosters or sheep or
    horses or farmers and their wives with mice that once spun

in small circles to children’s delight, oak clocks, clocks of ivory
    irony, aluminum alarm, plastic grace, yellowed whites

like tired eyes, grays like boards left out too long in rain—all stand
    in pleasing array—but this signpost points in thirty directions.

No wonder I never know what time it is!
    This liminal Belfast in earliest glimmer of spring

wriggles into the raincoat and, despite its bloody past,
    could be nearly anywhere within the body or the earth.

Sitting before this monument to time, its silent mellifluence of green,
    its threat or promise of birdsong or the sound of striking, I note

how milky tea grows cool, limbs warm. In my absence, here. I am.

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Kathleen McCoy‘s books include Green and Burning (Word Tech Editions, 2016), a Book Excellence Award finalist; More Water Than Words (chapbook, Finishing Line Press, 2017), and Ringing the Changes (Finishing Line Press, 2019), a Book Excellence Award finalist. Her work has been short-listed or commended in the Writer’s Digest Annual Awards, Fish International Poetry Prize, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition, and the Discovery Award. A Distinguished Professor of English and 2017 recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Scholarship and Creative Activities from the SUNY Adirondack, she teaches creative writing and lives in Queensbury, New York, with her husband and the cats who own them.