Classic Poem

I wait for the herring gull
to fall off in the wind
thudding all day on the bluffs
where the road drops from Pennralltygardde
through sheep-sorrel down to the sea.

Surely wings are the wrong thing
for standing in one place.
This day, the downturn of a feather
could scale him to Cardigan,
twenty miles on the Pembrokeshire Coast.

Even the cows move. I wonder
and wonder how a herring gull
without mathematics resolves
on a point in space—the space
rushing under him, too, like time—

and hangs there, perfectly still,
an equation of grey wings.—
While I've blown away like thistle
three thousand miles to Glanrhyd
and left all I love behind.











By permission of the author.