The Kittiwake

                              

Unknown

The Kittiwake

With blistered heels and bones that ache,
Marching through pitchy ways and blind,
The miry track is hard to make;
Yet, ever hovering in my mind,
Above red crags a kittiwake
Hangs motionless against the wind—
Grey-winged, white-breasted and black-eyed,
Against red crags of porphyry
That pillar from a sapphire tide
A sapphire sky. . . . Indifferently
The raw lad limping at my side
Blasphemes his boots, the world, and me. . . .
Still keen, unwavering and alert,
Within my aching empty mind
The bright bird hovers—and the dirt
Of bottomless black ways and blind,
And all the hundred things that hurt
Past healing, seem to drop behind.

 

 

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

 "Yet ever hovering in my mind" - what do you call that? An image within an image? The bird in the sky and the bird in the mind? I love the inner/outer exploration Gibson show us. Is this what everyone does? Do we all see something in nature and within ourselves simultaneously? Is there an almost unconscious relating ourselves to another form of life? Is there something about us that is tree-like, for instance? 

There must be hundreds of poems in which a person, at a low moment, looks at the landscape, the trees, or the creatures around them and says something like, "That leaf with the blotches and dried edges, that is how I am inside", or "If only I could be like that grass-blade I just stepped on - it springs up again after I'm gone." 

We seem to be in a conversation with our world. "Kittiwake" is a particularly beautiful expression of that. The image of the bird is like the action of the mind, rising up, leaving the trouble behind, letting it go. There's comfort in that thought, even when the trouble must be gone through.