wide skies & sheltered nooks

by Ben Bruges

The bird-scarer blast makes toddlers squawk 

and adults tut at the neighbour who tries

to scare gulls away from nesting on our houses.

I’m glad he fails. The roof is a perfect replica

of the cliff’s nooks and crannies, but nearer

to the wingless ones’ fast food and rubbish.

Their shrieks and chattering calls mean ‘seaside’,

and is a reason to live here, and to let them live

in peace even with the muck and chip-stealing. 

Watching gulls circle high for hours, immaculate 

with downy chest, wide wingspan, call-cawing, 

with playful twists and swoops – moments 

with no clear purpose swoop high into the sky. 

A buzzard glides over, unconcerned, it seems, 

by the gulls mobbing it, surrounding, shouting, 

working as a gang to get this dangerous predator 

away from their chicks, their nests, their airy home,

and still the hawk glides, sharp-seeing.

As one gull gang hands over to the next,

the raucous racket continues into the next valley.

Most years a near-fledged grey-brown chick

lands in our garden, having mistaken downwards

for flying, unable to get back onto roof’s safety.

Ignored by exhausted parents, who leave us 

with the vulnerable one we help onto a shed roof 

to protect from cats and foxes, hawks and scarers.

Eventually it becomes white, pure and invulnerable, 

but for now its shrill-note shee shee is relentless, 

so are reluctantly fed vomited fish bits and chip remains 

by parents who glare at us, side-eye, with cold-circled stares.

Ben Bruges works in education, is Features Editor for Hastings Independent Press and has poems published in Interpreter’s House, Banyan Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Write Under the Moon, Memoirist, Howling Owl, ‘special consideration’ for The Wee Sparrow Press’ ekphrastic competition, Creaking Kettle & Elizabeth Royal Patton Memorial Poetry Competition anthologies. He is a member of Hastings Stanza Group. Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate complimented the poems “for their density, thoughtfulness and cleverly pausing rhythms. [They] manage to make the urban city-scape resonate like a pastoral one.”