September 2019
Robert Nisbet
robert.nisbet042@gmail.com
robert.nisbet042@gmail.com
Note: My working life was spent teaching and lecturing and I am still only semi-retired as I tutor a few small classes with groups in writing and local history. But one of my real preoccupations, in my seventies, is with the natural world around us and our own responses to it.
Note for US readers: the British blackbird unlike my understanding of the American one, is a hugely popular bird, whose wonderful song delights us from April to June each year..
Procession
Maybe Dai Morgan followed by the blackbird,
maybe the blackbird first, and Dai, seconds later,
coming in from his walk, old-sailor-rolling.
Anchored in my gateway we greet the day.
Steve the postman is predictable enough,
last Saturday’s results and football talk,
but the blackbird now is joyously above us,
has soared in his song to the telephone wire,
giving out carol, giving out spring, old Orange Beak.
Then a mother and her son of two years old.
She’s pretty, smiling, it’s kind-to-all morning
and she’s registering maybe “two old boys”.
The little boy takes in perhaps the legs,
four legs in corduroy athwart his path.
He gazes up at Dai’s and my crow’s nest.
And the morning’s people now enact the rites
of a fresh May, Smartphones half-neglected
in a willingness to see some good around us.
A Particular Path
Neyland Marina, Westfield Pill
Pembrokeshire, Wales
As we leave the marina, the small craft’s jumble,
to walk inland along the estuary, we are beneath
a road bridge whose cars look slow, an illusion
(they are travelling at forty mph), since already
we are beginning to sense a kind of distancing.
Half a mile in, on the opposite bank, is the heron,
always there and so still you’ve wondered often
if he might be just a crease in bark and foliage.
In fact, not. He is a sentinel, a hearts’ ferryman,
at the entry to the waters’ unexpected kingdom.
The waters and their species ooze regeneration.
They teem with bird and fish life, cries and calls,
the sploshing sounds of the nearly submarine.
Our tutored memories will have told us once
that such places are as fertile as any on earth.
From moment to moment, a scrabble of people
will brush by on bikes, walk, stride, stop to talk,
before they retreat to the trees of the next bend.
And just four miles in we are rising from the waters,
passing, as day fades, the disused railway track.
Procession
Maybe Dai Morgan followed by the blackbird,
maybe the blackbird first, and Dai, seconds later,
coming in from his walk, old-sailor-rolling.
Anchored in my gateway we greet the day.
Steve the postman is predictable enough,
last Saturday’s results and football talk,
but the blackbird now is joyously above us,
has soared in his song to the telephone wire,
giving out carol, giving out spring, old Orange Beak.
Then a mother and her son of two years old.
She’s pretty, smiling, it’s kind-to-all morning
and she’s registering maybe “two old boys”.
The little boy takes in perhaps the legs,
four legs in corduroy athwart his path.
He gazes up at Dai’s and my crow’s nest.
And the morning’s people now enact the rites
of a fresh May, Smartphones half-neglected
in a willingness to see some good around us.
A Particular Path
Neyland Marina, Westfield Pill
Pembrokeshire, Wales
As we leave the marina, the small craft’s jumble,
to walk inland along the estuary, we are beneath
a road bridge whose cars look slow, an illusion
(they are travelling at forty mph), since already
we are beginning to sense a kind of distancing.
Half a mile in, on the opposite bank, is the heron,
always there and so still you’ve wondered often
if he might be just a crease in bark and foliage.
In fact, not. He is a sentinel, a hearts’ ferryman,
at the entry to the waters’ unexpected kingdom.
The waters and their species ooze regeneration.
They teem with bird and fish life, cries and calls,
the sploshing sounds of the nearly submarine.
Our tutored memories will have told us once
that such places are as fertile as any on earth.
From moment to moment, a scrabble of people
will brush by on bikes, walk, stride, stop to talk,
before they retreat to the trees of the next bend.
And just four miles in we are rising from the waters,
passing, as day fades, the disused railway track.
© 2019 Robert Nisbet
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF