Robert Nisbet

A Mirror

The mirror was a large oval, with a vulgar
Victorian frame, scrolled round with flourishes
and foliations. As we streamed through
the hallway, it caught our youth.
Our limbs shining in swimming gear,
the glow of chestnuts, the linseed gloss
on cricket bats, the flurry of our sister’s
spring flowers, the pink of winter walking.
Our thirties front door’s coloured glass was
in the mirror’s ken, and the oval caught
its and the time’s multi-coloured gauds.

When our mother died, the mirror was moved
to an upper landing, in very little light,
as if in a perpetual evening.
And when Maria came, the mirror was moved
to lie, for years, in the dark of the attic.

Today the mirror stands alongside Maria’s Volvo
at a car boot sale. But at least we can be glad that now
it is in the light, and more than light,
that it stands, this sunny Sunday morning, facing East
from a Powys hillside, before streams and hedges,
here to be bought, to reflect again maybe
the sun and the opening, happening years.

Robert Nisbet is a poet from Wales who has over 500 poems published in Britain and the USA, in magazines like San Pedro River 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.