The Gull: to Jeffers

I strove for reckoning upon these shores
Of battered stone, sand and shattering waves.
I watched a seagull above them soar
And know the cold, but know no pain.

And through the blackness I strode with that strange gull
That pressed into the wind above the roar,
Headlong toward a goal that with all its might pulled -
Its wings leaving an invisible impress across the moor

And down the sandstone cliffs to the sandy shores
Left it… like a feather through a cleft
Of rock and time, fading. Yet in my core
The defile my footprints made was mere spindrift

And let each step be done, as best I could.
When I came here, I brought no polemic –
Only unwritten poems that tossed like driftwood
Inside my blood, and from it pulled a gnarled stick…

Tracing my thoughts in the sand beneath the moon.
Watched them spill, cast in silver, yet of no worth.
Watched them linger before the erasing surf
As I their singer, slowly wandered, marooned

And again I saw that same gull, just a ghost
Suspended in the wind, plying its course
As though it couldn’t leave and haunted this coast.
It complained, yea, it shrieked above these shores

A face lean and rough as a cypress
It couldn’t pass. It shrieked as if it deplored
My presence, and wanted to halt my trespass
For I was a man, a thing it abhorred.

J. Landon