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.