Three Wonderful Poems by Robert Nisbet

 

Origins    

 

Our Dad the vet delivered calves.

My brother and I would go along sometimes,

watch as the sudden, new and leggy being

slithered into life and cowshed lamplight,

wrestling and fighting, from early minutes,

to stand and walk.

 

On one of our trips, leaving the cowshed

in a muddy mid-Pembrokeshire dawn,

we saw and heard a big black rooster

crowing his song of reproduction

and the slippery fight for life.

 

By the Waters

 

For most of my youth there were waters.

Newgale, half-loop of orange beach,

our caravan, the mesh into light brown,

the dusty summers. Our eyes, kept open

stubbornly below sprawling waves,

gazed into seas and greens,

millennia of spinning sand. 

 

Swansea. Again, a beach, a bay. The bus 

to the Mumbles, the Bristol Channel,

waters rocking on the pier’s struts, hoping

for the honky-tonk of evening bars.

 

Later, Larkfield. The grounds strolled down

past stacks of elms to the River Wye,

the river’s sudden gleam in morning sun,

the towers of that fine white Severn Bridge.

 

 

By the Beach

 

Clearly she needed rest and soothing

so she found her way to the bungalow,

looking out, from halfway up the hill,

to the bank of pebbles, the beach and the sea.

 

Beyond the beach was the unmeasured stretch

of the ocean and its species.

 

Those people with her, they few helped,

the quiet noise, the coffees, afternoons,

the silent interludes.

 

And finally, after climbing over the pebbles,

she would walk on the still strand of the beach,

crisscrossed by tracks and rivulets.

Pink, brown, spread out, were the billions of grains. 

 

 

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet living some 30 miles down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. His work has appeared widely in Britain and the USA, where he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (twice) and for a Best of the Net award.