The Crofter's Daughter / The History Teacher's Tobacco Pouch by Robert Nisbet

The Crofter’s Daughter

The teacher, plump, his jacket sad

with pipe smoke, brings her to the class.

I’d like us to welcome our little Hebridean.

It’s kindly meant. Indeed the class,

eleven years old themselves, are kind enough.

But there are so many, just so many children,

hundreds, a thousand, in that steel town school.

Passing from bell to bell, from week to week,

she likes learning Welsh, likes the crafts, 

but she puzzles over rugby and the steel town’s lust

for such a muddy, heavy game. In Cornaig School,

they’d played rounders, twenty of them. 

And then her mind rushes to the island,

where the white sandy machair spread

down the furlong from their farmyard

to the beach. They had dogs with island names,

Jura, Tobermory. And she’d be milking in the byre

before she went to school. 

                                          Now the steel town

and a couple of years’ unrecognised damnation.

 

 

The History Teacher’s Tobacco Pouch

 

He’d spread a plump tobacco pouch

before him, lunch times, at bridge,

rubbing out the warm brown curls

of Erinmore, letting float a light 

Virginian scent, then tamping,

tamping down, pressing the orange

threads to service in the deep and blackened

bowl of his meerschaum. He liked

breast pocket handkerchiefs, ensigns

of red and purple, tilting oddly

askew by morning break. His nail file

would fire puffs of dust from his

pink, scrubbed nails. Only when the

lunch time bivouac had ended, would

he return to what he knew was always

there: the classroom door, the cruelty. 

 

* Both poems appeared in Roundyhouse in 2012.

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.