Night and Her Sister / Night Porters by Robert Nisbet

Night and Her Sister

Ellie was a party girl, flickering under
the Queen Street lights on Saturdays,
the night clubs shouting, taxi back
to a rickety flat in a half-lit road, beneath
the nearby industry’s dense breath.

But there was home-ache, always was,
for the farming village near the Irish Sea,
where nights download their textures:
the autumn evenings’ smell of hay;
in January, the crackling tang of frost.

Now a home-ache to be near her sister,
a vicar in that farm-flanked parish,
riven by a crisis of soul and faith,
knowing the nights which smelt of harvest,
but knowing too the aridity, the heart’s clash.

Ellie wanted to be home, be there,
in the spirit’s night, for the woman torn
by faith’s low cry and reason’s call.



*This poem appeared in Ann Arbor Review in 2018.



Night Porters

Their biscuits plod through tea.
There are no lecturers at this hour,
thank God, but a few girl students
whisking down a re-crossed path
from Hall to courtyard, yard to Hall.

The teapot stews. Dai reads Tribune,
dreams of a Socialist dawn
with few students and fewer lecturers.
Michael, teenage himself,
his shoulders stooped into a stuttering shyness,
thinks more of the moonbeams which rest
some evenings on the campus grass,
of the girl who will one night appear
in the still courtyard, lay her hand on his,
hear the stammering cease.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who has been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain, where he won the Prole Pamphlet Competition with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes in 2017, and in the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.