Hunting Season by Robert Nisbet

The Fox Hunt Meet

Haverfordwest, Wales, 1962/3


Boxing Day, the Meet, a clamour of hounds.
Jack Stirrup is perched high, is mounted.
Looking on, Jonesey and a student gang,
English, physics and philosophy degrees.
Fat Stirrup is the banter’s target.

Week later’s train, and opposite Jonesey,
plumply wrapped in Times and waistcoat,
resplendent Stirrup who, Jones imagines,
is planning fresh assaults by brake and bush.
As indeed he is. The scent of trail
is large in his mind’s nostril.

Jonesey’s days will be busy soon with females,
Sarah from Boots, blonde Marguerite
from the women’s hall. Jonesey is laying trails
of compliment, dances, seats at the Odeon,
some warm and blushing outcome.

And part of Stirrup’s mind (unknown to Jones)
is on the filly from Surbiton.
And this will be seduction. This will hurt.



* Published in Prole (Wales), 2019

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.