Watching the harbor / Where gulls are swarming a trawler, / Waiting for my number to be called.

::::::::

I am at Shaws, on the wharf
Watching the harbor
Where gulls are swarming a trawler,
Waiting for my number to be called.
A woman, a table away
Exclaims, "A gull!!"
I turn to see a large bird
With a black head, white body
And dark rose-colored bill
Standing on the railing
Overlooking her table.
My first thought is,
That is no ordinary gull.*
With her friends looking on,
She offers it a French fry
Which it snatches and flies off,
But not before I snap,
"Why don't you give it
Some of your fish!"

Moral:
When an unusually beautiful sea bird
Shows up at your table on the wharf
And begs for a hand-out
Don't feed it junk.
Look what it does to us!

.....................................
*Franklin gull. A friend helped me identify the gull I saw in Maine, which is easily confused with a black-headed gull or laughing gull (depicted in the public domain photo, perched on a piling). The Franklin gull has slightly more black in the front, extending down its neck like a bib and the white spot encroaching on the wing is more rounded. A Franklin gull is a prairie-marsh gull and only rarely appears on the coast (east or west). He thought it might have left its native habitat due to development or fire.

(Article changed on Jul 02, 2023 at 7:41 AM EDT)

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.