In a cottage, a smallholding, by the Aber road,
the Welshman Emlyn and American Joan
slip now, at eleven on an August evening,
into night and nudity and their ruminations.

Tonight they’ve talked of avian flu, of fruit crops,
village markets, planned October sowing,
the gate’s cracked hinge, the walks over the top
to the morning blue horizon of the bay.

News bulletins seem very distant now.
Horrors and ugliness are still being sculpted,
inanities balloon beyond proportion,
but Joan’s Arizona home has desert blooms

and the night around them here is prodigious.
The fields and hedges rustle, in a summer dark,
with owl and badger, sleeping cattle,
the weight of procreative breathing.

Robert Nisbet is a poet from Wales who has over 500 poems published in Britain and the USA, in magazines like San Pedro Review, Third Wednesday, and Burningword Literary Journal. He lives in a small market town within 15 miles in one direction of the ancient cathedral city of St. David’s, and 20 miles in the other direction from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse.