July 2017
Robert Nisbet
robert.nisbet042@gmail.com
robert.nisbet042@gmail.com
I wrote short stories for over 30 years, publishing 100 of them almost entirely in my native Wales, partly because there was little market for short fiction in England, and the USA, in those pre-Internet days, seemed a long way away. Around my 60th birthday and for no conscious reason, I switched to poetry and now send work out to journals throughout Britain and the USA. I have one chapbook, Merlin’s Lane (Prolebooks, 2011).
The Night Service
St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle
At the compline service, above the altar, a huge wheel,
its glass stained warm ochre, the spokes silver.
In pews and around the altar, the students sit.
They've come in threes, in twos, Noah's people.
They've come in T-shirts, skimpy pants, with
the long bronzed legs of a hot summer.
Nine-thirty. To the chancel come eleven
choristers, black, monastic. Clerical crows.
They fling their liturgies of worship into
the bated joy beneath that large brown wheel.
The celebrants, benign, absorb it all.
Some massage another's shoulders, ease hence
the cares, maybe the sins, of earth and world.
The service over now, they walk silently out.
The evening's incense scent is swamped
just briefly by the faintest smell of sweat.
The air’s still warm, but above us still
that huge brown wheel stakes out its presence
in a darkening night sky
St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle
At the compline service, above the altar, a huge wheel,
its glass stained warm ochre, the spokes silver.
In pews and around the altar, the students sit.
They've come in threes, in twos, Noah's people.
They've come in T-shirts, skimpy pants, with
the long bronzed legs of a hot summer.
Nine-thirty. To the chancel come eleven
choristers, black, monastic. Clerical crows.
They fling their liturgies of worship into
the bated joy beneath that large brown wheel.
The celebrants, benign, absorb it all.
Some massage another's shoulders, ease hence
the cares, maybe the sins, of earth and world.
The service over now, they walk silently out.
The evening's incense scent is swamped
just briefly by the faintest smell of sweat.
The air’s still warm, but above us still
that huge brown wheel stakes out its presence
in a darkening night sky
© 2017 Robert Nisbet
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