Poetry by Robert Nisbet
By now he was washing his feet
with difficulty, ached a lot
most mornings, but always he walked,
first with the dog, then, when she’d gone,
striding alone round his domain.
It was a tour of inspection, decades
of shift and character and happening,
remembered and re-created.
Most treasured of all, the Common,
its cricket pitches and its trees.
His initials and Moira’s were carved,
fading, blurred but readable still,
in the mighty oak beside the seconds’ pitch.
His sons, the crowds, the matches,
once, the breathless pleasure
of his granddaughter’s single game.
Walking back, through unexceptional streets,
he would trawl his shoal of recollections,
alliances and families, time’s dole,
how Moira married the aircraftsman,
but that didn’t in the end gainsay
the good of all that happened otherwise.
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet, a now-retired English teacher and college lecturer, who wrote short stories for forty years (with seven collections) and has now turned to poetry, being published widely in both Britain and the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
