Into the Spring by Robert Nisbet

We’ve had a hard winter. In the town,
two shops have had to close, a draper’s
and a newsagent’s, these last two months.
Saturdays, there’s bingeing on the Square,
other nights brawls, once a nasty fire.
That’s usual, but then there was, one
violent, icy Saturday, a bad, bad smash.
A lad of nineteen. Killed. What can you say?
What can you say to that?

As spring came, the spray was lighter,
warmer. The hawthorn, gorse and apple trees
blossomed a mile or two inland.
We had the annual orange portent of
the blackbird’s populous nests and
fabulous song. And still winter’s
sombre prognostic seemed set to
face down the green heave of May,
until, one school sports afternoon,
my granddaughter of seven, knowing
only a trusted harbour of grass and sky,
ran the first real race of her life,
she finishing third. Quite thrilled with that,
she puffed the hugeness of her joy and I
rejoiced in third, her happiness, her race.
I find it easier now, daily, to delight
in birdsong and the hedges’ leaf.


*The poem first appeared in Weyfarers (UK) in 2011.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work has appeared widely in Britain and the USA. He won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2017 with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes. In the USA he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times in the last three years.