Lucinda Madsen
Here,
the murres are all on the big sea stack, where that wave just struck. At the top
you can see them huddled together, chatting, preening, mating–
we can only presume, we can only see the crowd,
white belly black body after
white belly black body.
Kinda like penguins–but not, of course, alcidae vs spheniscidae,
north vs south. Like other auks, further north the common murres
are dying off en masse, their starved bodies carried
into land on too-hot waves of guilt.
Now,
steer the lenses down to this froth of water–
see the pigeon guillemots bobbing in pairs on a swell,
red webbed feet paddling in place, the white stripe on the wings as their tell.
Swivel your glasses again, to the guano-spotted cliff-side
patches of nesting cormorants. Brandt or pelagic or double crested–look
to the crest of color at the back of their heads, lifted up on the long
S-curve of their necks as they sun their great wings out,
wet and tired from diving.
I apologize,
I am less familiar with their massacres.
The ocean runs into the rocks, headfirst, then drains
back through a sieve of sea palm. The birds aren’t buffeted–
they keep floating and diving and shrieking
if you’re close enough to hear them. The wind
tends to steal the sounds first, buffering us
from too closely witnessing the lives and deaths of seabirds.
Only the distant barks of sea lions penetrate the wind-static silence.
Lucinda Madsen is a sophomore studying Environmental Engineering. She is a lapsed linguistics nerd, an aspiring birder, and a current poet.
