Gulling

I’ve seen a gull dissect
a bin: watched it pick through
grease-proof wrappers,
flattened cans, sports-lid Evian,
for a chink of gherkin,
knocked back like vodka,
pulse in its neck, a student chef
in unwashed whites, eyeing up toddlers
on the forecourt. Then, it’s sudden span,
the shock of a cretaceous take-off,
a beak to equal the gormless stork,
to lift a new-born swaddled in cotton
with a streak of malice:
let the bairn slip and fall like rain,
communal feast in the ornamental garden,
a baptism of caws.

We are the parasites;
they are the ones who can fly.