The Grey Headed Albatross Tells You His Story
By Grace Mitchell
On the island of our kind, so you may have heard,
full of sea crashes and tender beak brushes,
wingspans as wide as the distant world,
feathers nestle in proudly sculpted houses,
built of walls of grass and mud, to shelter
escape artists of eggshells from salty air.
Your poets call us ‘the bird that made the breeze blow.’
The frail wings flailing from the nest could tell,
it was the breeze that made the bird blow.
Tufts of newly hatched white caked with dirt,
splayed, little legs go still in the storm
blown straight from the mouth of a predator
with skin like yours, poisonous to the Earth’s touch,
as it oozes with gas, and fuel, and greenhouse glory.