Even Prompter

Gannet

Gannet

Birds, you say?
And what a twittering, hooting, gaggling crowd that comprises.
Not easy to choose in that squabbling, fluttering mess.
But here’s one, a favourite,
a smooth feller of muted colours and fine gradations,
yet starkly picked out in black
on head and wingtips.
A sour expression surmounted
by an angry, glaring blue eye
and hard he may be,
being a bird of the ocean wastes,
inured by life in that vast and pitiless expanse
to the wing-tucked and aerodynamic plunge
from on high to the dark depths and a cold meal of silvered fish.
Not one for sentiment he,
and ready to fight
at the end of a long and arduous flight
for a patch of rock on a cliff face of some lonely, storm-battered isle
where a thousand others seek a nesting.
No fear has he of this life of struggle,
of the icy waters of these northern seas
or the winds that tear at his precarious foothold on land;
‘tis all he knows and,
if truth be known,
there’s beauty in more than his soft, white colours
and clear-etched face.
His dragon eye has looked and sneered at death.


Line count: 27
Free verse
For Promptly Poetry Challenge, Week 21 2022
Prompt: Birds.