They are gently pulling a fishing line from its throat;
its eye is a wet-dark furrow in its yacht-smooth head.

The tiniest oxygen mask hovers before its beak:
do they have a stash of them tailor-made for seagulls?

For biggish birds? Or was it hastily crafted for this case?
The team are in scrubs, everything set out, such care

to not hurt it more, hoping it can soon resume its squawks,
its epic snatching of sandwiches from us, the unprepared.

A memory scratches at me, in which the seagull
doesn’t make it. But I watch so many of these things,

I could be thinking of another patient, a swan or a hawk
—and yet the seagull hits different. It isn’t cute at all.

Not a crowd-pleaser or endangered. It is just this life
that someone decided was worth a mask, worth saving.

*
From Magma 89, Grassroots 

 

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