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
