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.

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.

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.

As You Like It in the Bishop's Palace / The Territory by Robert Nisbet

As You Like It in the Bishop’s Palace
An open-air production in St. David’s

A coastal summer and cathedral bells
and the rooks’ hauteur give us this night in Bardic country.
Foreground, romance in a forest.

From the back row of canvas chairs
they watch, they two.
They have not yet adventured.
But the voice of the lovers is reaching them
from the forest, from the palace,
and as eight o’clock deepens to a cooler nine
they draw the blanket more around themselves,
nestle.

Rosalind and Orlando are eighteen, nineteen,
but grown to love’s confidence
in the play’s disguise.
The playwright stakes out his promise:
Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love.

The watching two are in thrall.
Their hands, beneath the blanket,
steal together, clasp,
as in the happy ending of a play.


* This poem first appeared in Scintilla (2020)

The Territory

Things start with the cathedral,
a natural meeting place for wary lovers
from holy homes, aged twenty-nine
the two of them. From nave to chancel
to lady-chapel they threaded steps
and conversation, only to return then
to the city-village, to the ice cream
parlour’s rum’n’raisin, and some easing
of the mood. Their coast path walk
took them through floods of yellow
gorse, bathed them in sun. Is it too
fanciful to use the phrase “white light”?
Maybe it was the warmth, the sweating
of that squeezed untidy kiss. It would be good
to report that they hurried to the beach
and skinny-dipped. Et cetera. Well, no.
But as cathedral bells tolled evensong,
and heights of rooks exclaimed their
fright, our two were twenty miles away,
sequestered in a little bistro, sharing a
bottle of Chilean Merlot, making plans,
making such plans.

Robert Nisbet has been published widely over 15 years in Britain and the USA. His collection, In a Small County, appeared from Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea) last year.

Treading a Path / In the Portage Bay Cafe by Robert Nisbet

Treading a Path

Nineteen-seventies half-heard-of place.

You needed to tread up through the garlic 

and the raspberry canes to the hall,

a sort of hall, with a lovely grained

and golden floor. Sometimes committees

of a kind would sit around there

on bean bags, but mostly there’d be

jazz and readings and swing and even theory,

the poetry of the impecunious.

The atmosphere was misty and loving,

not the hard coin of commitment

and convention, but un-metalled love,

as joyously unfocused as the garlic smell

and the raspberry-scented evening air. 

 

* First appeared in Jerry Jazz Musician in 2019

In the Portage Bay Café  

 

At breakfast time, the snow spins

its carousel through Seattle's winter streets.

Our meal out is an encampment

in America's gregarious heart, as waiters

teem, proffer their service's glad hand.

There are Rancher's Breakfasts, syrup,

pepper bacon, wafting coffee. In the midst,

in the steam of bonhomie, my grandson,

who is four months old, looks through 

and at it all, the ketchup bottles

and the cream-topped rolls, with utter

wonderment. Behind him, down town,

sky-scraping blocks raise their challenge

to the ferries and the islands and the inlets

out in the sound. On again, and there are

mountains, out in the countryside's

long reach, their peaks capped

by the brilliance of snow.

 

* First appeared in Atrium (Worcestershire, England) in 2023.

Robert Nisbet has been published widely over 15 years in Britain and the USA. His collection, In a Small County, appeared from Seventh Quarry Press (Swansea) last year.