A Cinema with a Courtyard by Robert Nisbet

It’s just a child’s imagination, they all said,
when she came back from visiting Wales,
crossing from Ireland to Fishguard and the Gwaun,
in Britain’s slowly-stirring post-war years.
She’d seen, she told them, miles and miles inland,
a cinema with a courtyard, a wonderful place,
great furniture stores around the square,
places to walk, and not just the movies (Reagan
in the B feature) but the graciousness.
She’d been told the cinema had operas,
Robeson had been, singers like that. O city life.

You were a kid, Ellie, you were only eight, they said.
It was some local flea-pit you’ve exaggerated.
But Ellie, retired, her relatives gone, searched records.
Cardiff? Queen Street? Not really. Swansea’s Odeon?
Hardly. Llanelli? Carmarthen even?

But she found it, fifteen miles inland from Fishguard:
The County Theatre in Haverfordwest,
there, in photos, looking much as she remembered it.
The Cavendish Showroom beside a wide arcade.
The mass, the sturdiness of the place, the imposing worth.
The river to the right, and local operetta certainly,
and yes, Isobel Baillie sang with Robeson there,
on May the first in 1938.

It stood for half a century, pulled down in time
for council offices. There was little fuss
because its grandeur was unfashionable,
nineteen-thirties-brick-built, in a Georgian town.
But for an Irish farm girl, growing up, a drudge,
it was her amulet of grace, youth’s glorious icon.

 

*This poem first appeared in Iris Literary Journal, 1.2 (2019) 

 

Robert Nisbet is a poet from Wales who has over 500 poems published in Britain and the USA, in magazines like San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday and Burningword Literary Journal. He lives in a small market town within 15 miles in one direction of the ancient cathedral city of St. David’s, and 20 miles in the other direction from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse.