Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself”, Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, “then you are a thousand years ahead of your time.”
Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. “What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?”
A long silence, “Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anyone who wanted to discover it; that’s got nothing to do with time. We’re ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.”“That’s something,” Jonathan said, rolling to glide inverted for a while. “That’s not half as bad as being ahead of our time”.
Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The Seagull Speaks Creative Commons Copyright

Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Canteen

(Signal Hill, St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, June 21, 2009)

At the old canteen at Signal Hill
Sitting on the wall staring out to sea,
The gulls glide gracefully,
Graciously soaring for me,
In the updrafts above the cliffs.

There is only the lonely distant sound of the sea,
Of the waves crashing on the rocks way below.
There is a dark, close, suffocating feeling here,
A mournful stillness.

I watch the dandelions moving to and fro,
The breeze blows their seeds out to sea,
An exercise in futility.

There are lost souls here,
Reaching out, but unable to fully break through to me,
I feel them around me nevertheless,
In eternal twilight they struggle for peace,
They yearn for the eternal rest they are unable to receive.

So long ago they sang their songs and drank their ale,
So far from home,
Within the walls, above these cliffs,
As the ancestors of the same gulls rode the same winds outside.

There is a darkness here,
A mournful hollowness,
Of heartbroken lovers,
Of men lost at sea,
Of drunken soldiers falling from cliffs,
Of lost souls infused with sadness,
Stifled by heavy snow,
Frozen in the cold,
Chilled in the ice-flows of time.

The feeling is overwhelming,
I can’t stand in any longer,
So I make to leave.

Somehow I know that the songs of the sad men,
 Who died here so long ago,
Will haunt these cliffs forever,
For eternity.

And mostly,
Only they will know.

The Flight from Umeå

Looking east through the window,
Intense, bright, white light from the early morning winter sunshine,
Dissolving the clouds that shroud the frozen seascape far below.

There is an austere beauty to the gleaming snow,
A purity that enfolds the glowing sea ice in the gulf,
Surrounding oases of cooling, steaming seas.

And as I traverse this trajectory through the air,
I prepare a path ahead for my sacred beloved,
Who will soon soar through the same crystal cold skies as these.


This poem was written in February 2010 on a flight from Umeå in Northern Sweden to Stockholm. There was an incredible stillness in the frozen landscape below that I had to try and capture...