Flamborough.

Flamborough

On a white chalk stack, in a grey North Sea

a solitary herring gull sits;

her fortress is impregnable,

and none dare challenge her supremacy;

Looking on from her lofty throne

in an old car tyre, she surveys the scene,

carved by time, by winds and tides;

the coves and caves

and rugged cliffs,

where countless noisy sea-birds throng

in jostling, quarrelsome colonies

in spring to rear their young.

Guillemots, dapper in black and white,

shuffle and grumble in tidy rows

on rocky ledges, or bob in neat

formations on the cold, grey waves;

while puffins, clumsy, clownish birds,

fly back on stiff and stunted wings

from fishing trips, to perform on the cliff edge

juggling tricks,

with wriggling sand-eels

held in bright-striped parrot beaks;

their raucous neighbours wheel and dip,

then soar aloft on brown- tipped wings,

riding thermals, skittish, show-off,

screaming their names, kittiwake! kittiwake!

drowning the skylark's song;

two gannets sail serenely by

slender, elegant, gleaming white,

disdaining this boisterous melee

and, rising high above the fray,

deliver a diving master-class.

Meanwhile Sunday cliff-top strollers,

stop to watch and enjoy the scene,

this soap opera of sea-bird life

round the tyre-topped stack in a grey North Sea,

and the herring gull, in her starring role,

looks on.

© Nicky Wheeliker 2013

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