flotsam and jetsam

Cherry

By Di_Hard

Sun, 29 Aug 2021
  • 1421 reads
10 comments
 

On the beach, among litter

a herring gull fledgeling, dead

beside a Happy Birthday balloon

 

 

background :

 

Soothed in vast freedom and insouciance  

of bouyancy, matching my shape as if

 

 

I were made for this place, but there's nothing

 

to eat here. Starvation overrides thought -

 

a sparkle in sway of light-net shallows -

 

instinct's linking quickness - untaught, muscles

 

tauten, perfectly adapted to catch

 

small fishes' silver slivers’ swerving dash

 

I stab, beak grabs, swallow, before my tongue

 

is aware there's no taste to the dry thing

 

rasping in my throat. I gulp and cough till

 

it goes down, to fill my belly with   p- a- i- n

 

that never passes as I weaken, so

 

one bright day , while I'm searching through waving

 

sea weed forests, something tangles, digs in

 

and biting I can't reach it – thrashing - lungs

 

fill; in the blue cradle all goes black. Slack

 

 

rocking smoothly, back and forth, a new corpse

 

slop-washes up the sand, is stranded where

 

 

a bright foil balloon on a stick is tossed

 

by a child in belief that it will fly

 

over the sea wall, lies still, whole, broken

Certificate U
Poem

Comments

Submitted by skinner_jennifer on

Such a sadness in your words here Di.

Jenny.

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Thankyou for reading and commenting, Jenny, I almost cried

 

Submitted by onemorething on

Sad image, what I see every time I see litter, I can't help imagining where it will end up. 

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Yes. The balloon was still fully inflated, shiny foil on a stick. The beach is terrifying just now, all the big wing feather quills poking through the rolls of seaweed like it is a huge beast itself, and the slender white bones like part of a construction game, meccano or something. Now all the tourists are here there are loads more bottles and sweets packets

 

Submitted by Rhiannonw on

Would nake quite a startling picture. Take care of your plastics! My mother-in-law did enjoy her huge 3 balloons procured by the care home (a '1', a '0' and a '2'). One did nearly walk out of the doorway - they were attached to weights - but was rescued. The movement was more often to looking as if she was 120 or 201 years old!

Is the problem of herring gull deaths more to do with over-fishing than rubbish? Rhiannon

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Hi Rhiannon :0) Thankyou for reading and the story about the balloons :0) About the herring gulls - as far as I can tell, they are meant to eat small things like crabs and little fish and sea urchins? Years ago, the mother one nesting on our roof, when a young one fell off, fed it small starfish. Although called herring gulls, according to (maybe Wikipedia?) they have the wrong kind of beak to catch herring or other big fish themselves, I think the name came from them chasing fishing boats for scraps? I have noticed the last few years fewer and fewer small creatures on the beach, no hermit crabs, starfish, butterfish at all this year, barely any crabs. Shellfish are far fewer. Not sure if this is the trawlers scraping the sea bed so there's no habitat for laying eggs/young creatures to grow up in, or climate change. Often there are pictures of birds caught up in plastic, and I've heard, in other places, if autopsies are done on dead birds washed up, often their bellies are half full of plastic. They are also meant to eat lots of earth worms in fields, but I know soil conditions in some places have declined owing to artificial fertilisers, loss of worms is a big problem. Here it might be because it has been very dry. Lately walking up our road have seen herring gull couples poking about sadly on people's hard baked lawns. So I don't know what happened to the one I wrote about, lots of things are against them.

It would have been a good (?) photo, only am a technophobe so don't have a phone or camera, so just wrote a snaphot poem, only I keep rabbiting on so mucgh in the comments bit I should have done a longer thing 

Thankyou very much for reading and commenting! I hope you are well

 

Submitted by Turlough on

I love how you have expressed so much sadness with just a few words. The saddest word amongst them is 'happy'.

Turlough

Submitted by Tom Brown on

Terrible hey? And it is everyday reality. You capture the essence in just a few words.

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Thankyou, that is such helpful feedback, Turlough!

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Thankyou very much Tom, for reading and your comment. Usually I'm a waffler! Hope you are well