Islands in the channel

 The gulls are curbing the cold salty air

Beyond and above the house they glide

Confrontational wilful against the wind

A dark tan fence runs along the garden perimeter

Beyond it is the wild

The rabbit plane of rocks and burrows

And again to the west are the abandoned buildings

Decaying hospital ruins, the end walls of Nissan huts

Left over from the war

And the gulls keep these only

Except perhaps some ghosts of the cholera

Who must have died there

And hundreds of years before

St Caddock lived here, in its deep peace

 

I go swimming in the little bay of a morning

It is fresh and cold to leap in at first

From off the jetty

The inexorable tide rolls on and pulls in undercurrents

The shifting vortices beneath my feet

I made the mistake once of going through an arch way called castle rock

Which lead me into open water

Immediately the tidal force of the eddying channel tried to pull me out

I had to hang onto the rock for dear life

And it took all my strength to pull myself back in

And Swim to the shore

The monks who lived here all drowned once when visting neighbouring Steep Holm

The island is safety

A haven in the stream of the sea

The torrent of the water which rushes past spells out doom

To any swimmer or boat not strong enough to fight the tide

Back on the island

Gulls swamp the colony

In voices of communal caterwauling

And intoxicating alarms and panics are set off

At intruders, a visiting buzzard, a peregrine hunting rabbit

They are hounded and harrowed by the gulls

A gull that has eaten a baddie from the mainland dump

Is suffering botulism and is dying, the others harangue it

In gangs take pieces out of the weary bird

There is no mercy and nothing is spared

Weakness is despised by their vicious natures

 

We walk through their nesting colony on daily walks

And they hound us and swoop down, screeching like witches

Shitting their foul substances onto our cloaked heads and backs

Like vast covens of these pre-pagan, primordial beings

Left to their own devices for years on end before mainlanders rediscovered the island

They feel certain rights and privileges over their conquered territory

Especially that over humans, from our waste they feed, but want nothing more

From us.

It is enough they eye us with their harsh cold fish eyes

 Like hooks, each adopts a manful posture of chest out

And their stride about the path we walk just in front dares our confrontation

They are hard

Fishermen, sailors not respecters of land lubbers or those

Who cannot show aerial skill, which they do

Like crosses in the sky, no matter how hard a gale they take off

Like spitfires in the war

Brave as iron, steadying the eddies of wind over their trembling wing

Until that incredible scything moment of aerodynamic equilibrium