Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who writes a poem most Sunday mornings in a large-windowed room looking towards the coast and the Irish Sea. His work has been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA, appearing regularly in San Pedro River Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, and Panoply.
My Father and the Age of Lady Chatterley
in memory of Alister Nisbet, veterinarian, 1912–1996 Chaos has come, he must have thought, finding in my effects that new-wave book. (Okay, a silly book in many ways but my adolescence gloried in a world new-found, a world in which a womanhood brought praise and not embarrassment.) But virtue’s ambush shot me down in flames.
A vet, Dad cursed the Min of Ag officials.
Then lecturers, effete and bearded clique,
were targets. (He didn’t seem to realise
that I was talking on King Lear, Twelfth Night
from a Cardiff podium.) Those other lecturers
stirred revolution, blasted embassies,
led demos, were bad buggers all.
We settled. The world settled. Life settles.
I became the confidant to a narrative
that ran from anecdote to something near
a prophet sounding order’s knell.
Once he declaimed (in perfect ballad metre),
A man who can’t castrate a horse
can’t call himself a vet.
In the nursing home he still made waspish jabs
at his targets, the actors, singers, councillors,
the Iron Lady, Number Ten, for sure.
But in time the protest tones grew gentler.
It seemed now he was firing off his darts,
but recalled the love for those he sided with
and even the bad buggers he maligned.
Clementine Unbound 