Pink Rain

It’s like talking of a lemon light, a blue mist,
a pale moonlight. In this case a pink rain.

It was something to do with Christmas
and I was leaving the supermarket,
buzzed, bugged, by muzak’s soothe and slink.

I walked out, into December,
the morning cool-ish but no frost,
and there was a rainbow over Broad Haven.

(Now Broad Haven, you must know,
six miles away, brings thoughts of summertime,
a beach, the haunt of proper holiday,
not jingle-bells, jingle-balls, on tap).

And in the rare rainbow light,
with the faintest drizzle setting in,
I caught a draught of the genuine thing,
the sky’s bright arch, light crystallising
into a glimmer of pink.

I sometimes feel we may quite well
annihilate ourselves in muzak’s flood.
Ourselves, but never the sky, the light,
the rainbow, the roseate rain.

_____

This poem first appeared in Illya’s Honey, 23.2

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Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who lives just 30 miles along the coast from Dylan Thomas’s Boathouse. Although he does not see himself as unduly competitive, he has just won the Prole Pamphlet Competition with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes from which ‘The Ella Fitzgerald Song Book’ is taken. It is available from the publisher at www.prolebooks.co.uk