It was a herring gull – sing any hymn you like.
Gull leads to landfill. Landfill leads to leaching. Leaching leads to leprechauns.
The herring gull poking around the misfits and, of the course, the bluetits soaking around in bloodbaths and, of course, the charlatans croaking about their titbits.
My herring gull is blue, shrieking blue on hue.
Remember the day the colony fled, trash cans fled, landfills fled, toxic pools bled out?
Pluck the herring gull – or else!
Gull flies, gull sighs, gull dies.
Gull feathers as calamitous and ratchety and barbarous as a barbarous and ratchety and calamitous three-tier wedding cake.
Herring gull!
On the contrary, the gulls colonise, and we, we just stop and stand and stare up, fixated, locked in awe in shock, and the gulls, well they just quip on colonising.
Grateful the gull, for her razor clams. Grateful the gull, for her Saturday night chips’n’brown sauce. Grateful the gull, for her red diamante dot.
Chips chips chips chips! This comely gull would jab at nothing more, nothing less.
The tall gull struts as the small gull shimmies and the middling gull ruminates.
Who are they who have trapped us in our apartments? The Herring Gulls. Who are they who have stormed our parliament, spaffed all over our decrees? The Herring Gulls.
All in all, they aren’t bad at soaring.
No, we mustn’t speak of it. The portly selkies that slithered up and out of the sea in the dark. That smashed up the eggs in every nest in Beach Lane. Shards of shell and spatters of yellow yolk all over the shop. No, there’ll be no mention of this, no mention at all.
Herring gulls, paddling up lugworms. Kittiwakes, scoring contours across a soldering sky. Sanderlings, jostling one another’s dainty damp feet. Dog walkers, stooping to scoop up shit.
The birder, out birding, snared the bird. He closed his eyes as he did it, but couldn’t block the sounds. Snap crack crunch.
And she, in her freckled winter plumage, lived off road kill and offal and grass seeds and orange peel and apple cores and starling chicks and song thrush eggs and voles and shrews and beetles and slugs and ants and mackerel and crabs and mussels and really anything that wriggled or sparkled.
A gull in a band is worth two in a rush.
Are we nearly there, yet? Absoherringgulllutely.
All over Scotland herring gulls breed chicks and rebellion.
Image by Daniel VanWart.
SANDERLINGS 