Robert Nisbet

Haverfordwest, Wales

 

Bio: Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work appears widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA, where he appears regularly in magazines like San Pedro River Review and Third Wednesday. He has been shortlisted for the Wordsworth Trust Prize in Britain and nominated for a Pushcart Prize in the USA.

 

Date written: 6^th September 2020

 

Winter’s Cabin

 

Your books are here, of course.

You have been told to rest anyway.

And you have a big front-window view.

 

The hedges are skeletal and sombre,

the evergreens a dank grey-almost-brown.

Just in the odd and tiniest scurry

is there a hint of some lurking creature.

 

You hear the postman with that wet thud,

a clank of metal flap. Just once,

going out to the doorbell,

you glimpsed a retreating courier,

exchanged a quick “Cheers, pal”

for a raised, acknowledging thumb.

 

The Lane’s real genius is Cerberus,

the dog from three doors down,

who would go rooting and sniffing

to the gates of Hell. Yesterday

he dragged some long sad object through.

A soggy cardboard box? The carcase

of some dead animal? The Fates alone know.

 

But today he’s after Aphrodite once again

(she being the Joneses’ pretty bitch).

He’s whined at the gate awhile but now

(talk about signs of spring), he’s backed,

now forward-rushed, a bound and he’s in.