Her Fields by Robert Nisbet

A March breeze was cutting bitterly

across her father’s fields, the farm,

her recollections, as she, new graduate,

prepared to leave, soon to marry

a lecturer in structural linguistics.

And of course she would, she should.

She was in love.

(History will tell us how, forty years on,

the professor, widowed, spent all his money

and borrowed more, to buy the farm,

to save it from being built upon,

and how new family of his and hers

set up a farming-holiday tourist place).

But that morning she was aching

with her sense of place and loss.

She could see them there, the hedges, furrows,

sheds, byres, milk stands, stabbed by the breeze,

leaving her with just the cruelty of departure,

for a haze and a beauty yet to be realised.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who once read for an American President, when ex-President and poet Jimmy Carter was guest of honour at the opening of the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in 1994. Nisbet is a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2020.