Young hope and an old dream
We sat on a bench, my new young friend and I, looking over the Bay,
he with feathers checkered brown and grey, fawn and cream,
the tips of his new black wings not yet distinguished
by the butterfly mirrors of grown-up white.
He stared long at me with his small dark eye, quietly snapped
his curved dark beak, and turned his sleek gull’s head
to stare far out into the shimmering horizon.
There he saw, I fancied, a seething shoal of forty hundred herring,
bounty enough to feed his flock for a season and a day.
I saw there a Man, who walked across the the tumbling waters
with two small fish and a basket of loaves,
and love enough to feed the whole sad, hungry world.
Naomi
