A Witness to Belfast (N.P. Ashley

A Witness to Belfast

The storm that was to come* Did not come at all Or came and went away Like the deceptive sun I wasn’t particularly looking for that

Belfast must have been like this Its Beckettian grey could not have been greyer Its cars and carts made only the breeze of a noise Its archetypal rain any less so, ever Its taverns, brimming with reddish poetry and bitter guinness A mountain-trapped, industrial town, with Gulliver guarding And its hapless, vulnerable sun I wasn’t feeling that

My visa was to a foreign land But I Ianded up in a somnambulist town That woke up in an alien lane (And had to live there) Like its dreamy, moony sun I wasn’t particularly seeing

The cream of Ireland that surfaced my eyes From the undergraduate reading lists Like a charmingly, cold handed sun And the refrigerated neon bulbs on the street A not so particular touch...

They said no “good mornings” They made the good mornings They adjusted the sun through clocks Made it into sharp pieces, rather. The ‘not-even-witness’ sun I wasn’t particularly noticing

Now I know even the sun is not universal!

_____________________________________________ * The reference here is to a storm that was to hit Northern Ireland on the day of my arrival in Belfast!

- N.P. Ashley, Department of English