Breakfast in Monmouthshire / Sea Breeze for Sarah by Robert Nisbet

Breakfast in Monmouthshire

Breakfast near the border,

by a spread of October farmland. 

A truck full of kit, a first gig in Bedfordshire,

and agents would be listening to our act, our songs.

We loved those songs, the four of us had crafted them

in a cabin at Devil’s Bridge. We called ourselves

Cambrian Mountain and we sang of land and places.

Suddenly, that morning, just short of Monmouth,

wings lapped above us, jackdaws rising

from the wood behind. We felt, that day,

full of the West, full of Wales.

 

When we made the journey back, in a lenten March,

having been crapped on,

we found a comfort of a kind

in the stillness of the Monmouthshire mud,

the gauntness of the jackdaws’ wood.                 

 

* This poem first appeared in Orbis (UK, 2013)

 

Sea Breeze for Sarah

 

Haunting Sarah’s nostrils, on this harbour front,

come the sniffs of tar, brine, jetsam, gutted fish.

Something here is urgent.

It’s not the classic sea-coast thing,

the Viking blood, the sagas, the passion.

Such gales burst further North maybe

but Sarah, whose life is laid out so much

in paragraphs and at desks,

feels a gentler thing,

maybe a gull’s feather’s thickness more oblique –

a restlessness, reminder of a world

quite close at hand, should she but choose to go there,

a world of wine and candles,

of evening’s cabin images.

 

Sniff the breeze, Sarah,

the seas, the rivers, the restlessness,

and then go back, go home          aware.

 

 

Robert Nisbet is from Wales, a former high school English teacher and college creative writing tutor who has been published widely in the USA, where he has four Pushcart Prize nominations, and in Britain, where his collection, In a Small County, has just been published by Seventh Quarry Press.