shot glass
title
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who is increasingly publishing in the USA, where his poems appear regularly in San Pedro River Review, Third Wednesday and Burningword Literary Journal, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (thrice) and a Best of the Net Award (by Shot Glass Journal).


Robert Nisbet


 

Upstream

She was a strange girl (but a lovely girl)
and she'd taken him, that Saturday,
to a river stretch she knew, leaving the Teifi
to track a small stream to its source
and to visit the haunt of the kingfisher.
He was a town boy, soon for university,
to London, Oxford Circus, UCL.
(Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
his headmaster had said).

The stream-life stirred, flickered ... he felt
the water's shimmer and the girl's sincerity.
When the kingfisher flashed by them,
she felt joy's radiance, orange, blue,
but he had almost blinked it by, kept feeling
the force that was drawing him on,
to a circus-brilliant but darker world.