Travelers Welcome

Travelers Welcome

Sunday, September 30, 2012

In the Beach Café, 1962

by Robert Nisbet
 
Exactly fifty years ago, this showery
August, we sat in a Broad Haven beach café
as rain rolled solemnly down the windows.
Those two boys, sickle-keen, their futures
carved in hope, into influence and mighty
good. The girl, long raven-haired,
our archetype, she played guitar for us,
smiling down vistas of love and socialism.
I’ve seen none of them again, in half a
century. I’ve seen no revolutions, carousels
of love and brotherhood. I simply hope
those boys never sold trash for easy greed,
polluted neither minds nor beaches,
that they’ll have taught, administered,
constructed decencies. And she, maybe
she worked on good and generous things,
maybe wrote songs. Maybe her children too
reached eighteen years of age
with hope and earnestness unhurt.

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