February 2019
Robert Nisbet
robert.nisbet042@gmail.com
Note: I write a poem most Sunday mornings in a large-windowed room in West Wales, looking away towards the Irish Sea. As these poems may show, I have a real love of the sort of small-town street gossip and incident which are part of the fabric here. My work has been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA.

Piano Movers


Douglas, the dandy, the music man,
moving house, brings in brawn,
one third of his school’s men’s staff room,
shifting that piano from upstairs.
At the top, the head of physics
and a Shakespearean, calling to those below,
Hark to my piece.
The staircase beef comes from the historian
Colin from Ton, and an economics teacher.
To their left, as the instrument descends,
a half an inch of finger room.
To their right, one tenth of a centimetre. 
What silly bastard, shouts Colin from Ton,
would put a baby grand in a council house
in the first bloody place?
 
From aloft, whole centuries of sound, sonata,
music’s magnitude,
sink slowly in their might upon history,
economics, reason, thought
and (may the fates be thanked)
a woodwork teacher.
Thus creativity is brought to earth
and six young men
lay it to rest in the long blue van,
go down the pub.
“Piano Movers” was originally published in Prole
​© 2019 Robert Nisbet
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