Newly together, coasting open road,
they parked the van, looked down from the hill
upon a village harbour, spruce with its boats
being taken out, repainted for the season.
They watched the boatmen, perceiving them
as bearded men in navy blue, returning now
to the open seas of quest and exhilaration.
They loved those men and their salty journeys.
(Griffiths, who’d originally grown that beard
because of shaving rash, had a headache that day,
but still, it was going into April now
and he was back in his Amethyst, a happy man).
Later, the van’s prow nosed back to the camp site,
passing the hedges’ promise and primroses.
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who lives about 30 miles down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. His poems have been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA, where he is a regular in SanPedro River Review, Jerry Jazz Musician and Panoply.
Sparks of Calliope 