Seagulls
Rent from DeepDyve- Seagulls
The seagulls in Guernsey had been the Naziswho’d conquered the island in the forties, soeasy to explain their take-all diving to snatchhamburgers, cones, off the child he’d been.
They may even have driven him away, acrossthe sea to Ireland, where the gulls were smaller,almost polite, happy to stick to the herringand keep a wide berth from humans like him.
He began to half-admire them and boughtbinoculars to study their shrieking aerobatics,marking them much higher than crows whoshared these Irish skies equally with the gulls
who began massing on the high-voltage cablesoutside his house, and a day came when oneswooped on his dog and carried it away, withthe rest of the gang noisily flapping in pursuit.
He never saw his dog again, and began to keephis baby inside, and he revised his hasty opinionof the gulls, who continued to crowd the cablesas if they were planning a huge avian offensive, [End Page 133]
so to ward off any such malign development,he devised a strategy of defence through attack—a very old story—he bought ten crusty loavesand a hundred razor blades, and spent a couple
of hours breaking off chunks and embeddinga razor blade in each, then bagging them all,driving to the North Mall, getting out of the carto stand and empty the bag into the River Lee. [End Page 134]
Matthew Sweeney’s recent volumes of poetry include Black Moon, Sanctuary, and Selected Poems. He is co-author, with John Hartley Williams, of a chapbook, [End Page 188] Writing Poetry (Hodder & Stoughton), and has edited and co-edited a number of poetry anthologies. Bilingual translations of his work have appeared in Germany, Mexico, Slovakia, and elsewhere.
