June 2020
Robert Nisbet
robert.nisbet042@gmail.com
Bio Note: I spent most of a teaching career in my native West Wales, teaching English at high schools in the small cathedral city of St. David’s and the fishing port of Milford Haven (established by whalers from Nantucket). I then spent another 14 years teaching creative writing on the degree courses at Trinity, a liberal arts college, in the market town of Carmarthen. The poems I’ve written in the past 15 years have been published in both Britain and the USA.

Imagine a Red Admiral


Dark steel town pub. Stale ale
and salted peanuts. Dai is oppressed.
Dreary Cleary and his sidekick, Ron,
are giving the world the works.
Lefties are the problem, says Cleary.
In schools, for sure. Marxists, the lot of them.
Hell yes, says Sidekick. Unions, hospitals.
Armed forces too, says Cleary.
They’ve got them there as well.

Across a grimy window, there spins
a sudden smudge, of oil or soot.
Just fleetingly Dai takes it for a butterfly,
imagining then a fine Red Admiral,
upon a hedge, yellow and effervescent with spring,
a view below falling to a river,
lighting the sheen of clear water
and a joy beyond rhetoric and the grey moment.
©2020 Robert Nisbet
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