Poems by Jack Mitchell - The Herring Gull
(by Jack Mitchell)
There is horror
in this herring gull,
standing there, statuesque,
over its own image in a rock pool.
No gull should loom like that -
so naked and unmitigated
in the morning light.
It's indecent.
It worries me.
I have no problem with the daintier sorts -
the one with the little black skullcap or
the one that cries kittywake
prettily over foam-flecked billows.
But this fellow is too big, too blatant, too glaringly gull.
All that bleakness of murderous beak
and bare, bold leg,
the opaque porthole eye,
the chill nudity of glazed white sea-plumage.
The brute's so obscenely clean,
less of a marine bird
than a bird marine -
and crude, and perfect.
Ah this merging of crudity and perfection!
Is that what worries me?
There it stands, a statue to itself,
over its own image,
vessel of an alien sentience,
oblivious of me
and all my anthropomorphic demands.
The truth is,
nature's ideal does not mirror ours,
and, though I may not like it much,
this is the Absolute Gull,
the Gull As Such,
bearing the perfect features
not of Plato's Republic,
or mine.
but nature's.
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©Renate Mitchell. May not be reproduced in any form online or offline without explicit written permission.
