Usurping by Robert Nisbet

If you walk to the village of Porthgain,

as much a cluster of cottages as village

(although it has a very busy pub

and a café selling fresh-caught crab)

you’ll pass the rusting railway tracks,

the site of a quarry sending its slate

out nationwide. It had an engine room

and a weighbridge, for this was industry.

Now the grass and gorse are flourishing again.

There are herring gull, chough and martin.

Once in a while, an adder figure-of-eighting

its way back into the undergrowth.

If you are driven from downtown Olympia,

bars, buildings, sidewalk, traffic scuffle,

you are, in few brief minutes’ clatter,

back to the suburbs and to broad back yards,

and there, most oftentimes at dawn and dusk

(more often though than adders at Porthgain)

are the deer, fine grey/brown beasts,

grand-antlered, nibbling the cultivated plants,

marking an interest in the territory.

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Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work has appeared widely in Britain and the USA. In Britain, he won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2017 with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes. In the USA he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times in the last three years.