The Hope of Wings

The girl forces the gull’s beak open with 
A spoon and starts to scrape the oil away.

Rampant the sky’s colours, legend and myth

Sustain the attention of those beset by

Traditional hungers, but now I foresee

A bird-emptied sky, the world’s shores

Hilled with crippled things, the thick, black

Smothering of oil murdering the hope of wings.

And this girl – she can’t be into her teens –

Would, if her working now is a guide,

Spend all her years remaking these stunned birds

Littering the sea, dead flops among stones.

She’d give a white-winged creature to the sky

Before black tides drown mere human words.