Song birds, such as larks, blackbirds and thrushes, always get a good press and are beloved of poets. Not so, that buccaneer of the seafront, the seagull. Mind your bag of chips or your hat when you are promenading on the beaches of Scotland as spring slips in. Brian McCabe writes a lively character study of this avian anti-hero.

The poem comes from McCabe’s collection Body Parts (Canongate, 1998) and is also published in The Edinburgh Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (EUP, 2005).

LESLEY DUNCAN

 

GULL

We are the dawn marauders.

We prey on pizza. We kill kebabs.

We mug thrushes for bread crusts

with a snap of our big bent beaks.

We drum the worms from the ground

with the stamp of our wide webbed feet.

We spread out, cover the area –

Like cops looking for the body

of a murdered fish-supper.

Here we go with our hooligan yells

loud with gluttony, sharp with starvation.

Here we go bungee-jumping on the wind,

charging from the cold sea of our birth.

This is invasion. This is occupation.

Our flags are black, white and grey.

Our wing-stripes are our rank.

N o sun can match the brazen

Colour of our mad yellow eyes.

We are the seagulls.

We are the people.