Upstream by Robert Nisbet

She was a strange girl (but a lovely girl)
and she’d taken him, that Saturday,
to a river stretch she knew, leaving the Teifi
to track a small stream to its source
and to visit the haunt of the kingfisher.
He was a town boy, soon for university,
to London, Oxford Circus, UCL.
(Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
his headmaster had said).

The stream-life stirred, flickered … he felt
the water’s shimmer and the girl’s sincerity.
When the kingfisher flashed by them,
she felt joy’s radiance, orange, blue,
but he had almost blinked it by, kept feeling
the force that was drawing him on,
to a circus-brilliant but darker world.

*First published in Shot Glass Journal #36 (2018)

 

Robert Nisbet, a Welsh writer, was for several years an associate lecturer in creative writing at Trinity College, Carmarthen, where he was also an adjunct professor for the Central College of Iowa. His poems appear in Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes (Prolebooks, 2017). Frequently published in the USA, he is a four-time Pushcart nominee.