Rough Sketch / Those Boys are History Now by Robert Nisbet

Rough Sketch

The sort of day I’m thinking of,
there’d be no prizes, necessarily,
nor pensions, perks, celebrity,
finance nor general purposes. There’d be
a little sunshine, maybe just
a very, very late winter’s edge
in the air, in that place
which runs the length of St. Bride’s Bay
(coves, gannets, sea crash) on to
Cardigan, lands and fields where there are
streams. I know I’d like a stream in this,
the smells of gorse, seaweed,
grass would do, and then to walk,
the hedgerows now so copious,
green as they will be through May
and June. Importantly, a row of cottages,
there as they were a century ago,
a meadow running down to
the road, a sheepdog’s crisp
bright yelp. Then, out on the sudden
orange beach, a teeming around of kites,
surfers and flying sails.



* First published in Obsessed with Pipework (Somerset) in 2010





Those Boys are History Now

I’ll sing a blues for those two boys,
cycling through their time and place,
a south-west corner of a small island,
thirteen years on from a continent’s vast war.
A tall road, summer-sweet with tarmac,
climbing from a seaside village,
from rock pool to hedgerow, tyre hum -
and the dates, the hopes, that Friday next,
the girls with pony-tails.


They are history now, those boys,
and we might search for them,
the names, the boys, the sentiments,
stacked up in family photos, newspapers,
exam results and names of teams,
postcards from Paris, microfilm.
(Praise, praise, to the stackers and recorders).

Sometimes they seem to fade, that scene, the people,
yet still they haunt that recollected tarmacked road,
evoking, evoking.



* First published in Sparks of Calliope in 2021

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.