‘Gull’: A Poem by Jim Hurford

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Gull

Pacing the parapet hungrily eyeing
papers and plastic cups in the dust,
her kin overhead, wheeling, crying,
watching their chance to steal a crust.

Floating down from the gable roof,
landing nearby with a busy hustle,
sidling close but warily aloof,
her breeze making papers gently rustle

wings akimbo, then ruffled back
smoothly swelling a chalky breast,
underside white and uppers grey-black
on the edge of starving, by scraps obsessed,

deftly lifting each three-toed web,
on folding wedges of saffron skin
like a demurely slippered Victorian deb,
stretched supple, flat and thin,

and forward-jointed yellow stilts;
watchfully angling her noble head,
foraging alert, her lithe neck tilts
her banana beak with its dash of red.

Bold, cautious, confident, stable,
she gulps down a sliver, slick and slimy,
a lucky break by the café table,
next, a pizza chunk stiff and grimy,

a bit too thick for a single swallow;
eager to thieve her hard-won scrap,
her brothers gather to fight or follow,
so off she takes with an airy flap,

and round the corners her kin give chase
in a screeching swerving airborne race.
Don’t malign them as mean and greedy:
in the loveless land of the lean and needy,
best pickings go to the keen and speedy.

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Jim Hurford is a retired professor of linguistics from the University of Edinburgh. In retirement, he has taken to poetry, and self-published several booklets celebrating the place where he has lived. One is Life and other diversions in and around Portobello in four hundred limericks. The other is Homage to California, in various rhyming forms, on the history and sociology of that state. He lives in Portobello, Edinburgh. Read more here: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/