Robert Nisbet

Valley, Farm, Vacation: Wales

So did the valley, did
that udder-wealthy green-wet pastureland,
reveal its magic for us,
that holiday, that summer?

We’d come from a city and a university,
from Anglo-Saxon, mediaeval studies,
some heavy stuff, but graced
with moments’ poems and odd nights’ libations.
We knew as well (it was part of the time,
the sixties into seventies)
of the movement back to nature and the land,
the fundamental-being story.

So the valley it was, to work on the farm,
in the cow sheds, byres and on the hay,
the hosing, brushing, shit and straw,
the blisters, smell of dung (a fair old hum
but not execrable), and the aching,
aching in the mornings, aching nights.

But many mornings, on the hotter days,
there was a shimmer to the air,
brightness and clatter to the morning milking,
and then at last the cows we were helping with
began to breathe a recognition.
And the splosh and sudden whiteness
of the milk, there’d always been that.
Evenings now, we’d slap our calloused hands  
against the last of the bales
and say, Okay, job done.

September, as we prepared to leave,
we could see the shining brown
of the furrows being ploughed for winter.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet whose work has appeared widely in Britain and the USA. 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.