The Boathouse, Laugharne, Wales
 
Searching for past and art, we climb
from the estuary, the herons, the gulls,
up the path to the poet’s Boathouse
and, roost-high on cliff, his writing shed.

The window looks in upon a capsule
of a post-war, cold-times, radio world,
the lamp, the bottles, pens,
the jacket over the chair,
and our eyes come to rest upon
what surely is his craft’s real cornerstone,
the raft of crumpled sheets, strewn paper,
faint, faded hieroglyphs.

We feel this quiet place, its heart beyond
the snatch of empires and economies,
a world whose rules are of paper and pen,
in which wealth shall have no dominion.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet, sometime creative writing tutor at Trinity College, Carmarthen, living a little way down the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. He has published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain and the USA. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2020.