May 2019
Robert Nisbet
robert.nisbet042@gmail.com
Note: I write from Wales, working most Sunday mornings in a large-windowed room looking away towards the Irish Sea. Increasingly I find myself writing to the seasons, so that this poem, set on "a late March Sunday", was actually written, very recently, on a late March Sunday. 

Inhabitants
 
The light in the Lane is almost crystalline,
as spring and a late March Sunday coalesce.
There are traces of late Saturday’s adventures,
but mainly in the alleyway by Tesco.
 
The cat, the mouser, has been out since four,
now squats content, mulling a fat corpse.
Ernie is in the garden early, hoping just
to weed a patch or two, smell earth.
 
The Harries sisters shape themselves for church,
having re-found a faith in recent weeks,
will sit at new vicar Rory’s pulpit-feet,
forswearing lust for Lent.
 
Greg’s garage doors groan open furtively.
Some fiddle again, a trip to Swansea later.
Some guy he knows on a trading estate.
Nice bit of wood, some felt, a few brass screws.
 
And two lost souls already on white screens,
one with her piece for the council’s focus group,
the seminar, inclusiveness, the other sweating
on his teaching module on King Lear.
 
And outside, in the blue and amber day,
the mouser’s teeth and claws are red indeed,
the hopes and quirks of humankind are flickering
and Ernie weeds the morning’s friendly earth.   ​
​© 2019 Robert Nisbet
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