The Breeze, The Wind by Robert Nisbet

It was a hot summer, that first long vacation,

but in the quiet distance of Western Britain,

as Dylan and Baez sang of the times,

we’d felt a breeze, warm, from the west,

from the Americas and beyond,

more insistent through September,

as we returned, to England’s universities,

to the newness, the serendipity.

The breeze, the wind from the west,

became, for a few of us, a spirit, a zephyr,

blowing in from the Caribbean, stuffed with spice.

Columbus’s search for eastern riches

merged in our minds with that westerly wind,

with a new dispensation, east, west,

black faces, white faces, all,

and it became the breeze, the wind

of new discoveries, with (we felt, we felt)

a whole spiced cargo that just might enrich.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet and sometime creative writing tutor at Trinity College, Carmarthen. He has published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2020.