Imagine a Red Admiral by Robert Nisbet

Dark steel town pub. Stale ale
and salted peanuts. Dai is oppressed.
Dreary Cleary and the sidekick, Ron,
are giving the world the works.
Lefties are the problem, says Cleary.
In schools, for sure. Marxists, the lot of them.
Hell yes, says Sidekick. Unions, hospitals.
Armed forces too, says Cleary.
They’ve got them there as well.

Across a grimy window, there spins
a sudden smudge, of oil or soot.
Just fleetingly Dai takes it for a butterfly,
imagining then a fine red admiral,
upon a hedge, yellow and effervescent with spring,
a view below falling to a river,
lighting the sheen of clear water
and a joy beyond rhetoric and the grey moment.



*The poem first appeared in Verse-Virtual, 2017

Robert Nisbet, a Welsh writer, was for several years an associate lecturer in creative writing at Trinity College, Carmarthen, where he was also an adjunct professor for the Central College of Iowa. His poems appear in Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes (Prolebooks, 2017). Frequently published in the USA, he is a four-time Pushcart nominee.