Seagull in the Desert

Wrote down a phrase of this when I saw a seagull the other day… and actually picked up that fragment of a note and wrote it out because it didn’t want to be forgotten.

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Seagull in the Desert

Have you ever found yourself
in the strangest of ways
and been at home there?
Like a seagull in the desert,
gliding on hot arid winds
without a sea in sight?
I wonder what passes through their head
as they stare off into shimmering
illlusions of water, is that how they got here?
Chasing waters on the horizon that never
appeared?
Mayhaps thats just what happened.
I have wandered thus and found myself
in the all the wrong places
made right because when I got there
they just fit.
In ways I could never explain to you,
but you if you’ve done the same
then you know you know it too.
It can only be known in the happening
its a thing not sought but occurring
and it explains itself to no one, why bother?
So I can figure how the seagull got there,
despite his nom de plume,
but not why it stays.
Is it the lack of competition,
the silence on that dry zephyr
so unlike where it once called home?
Is it the feeling of a different wind,
a lonely spirit that makes gliding, not basking,
just the right way to pass the day?
A lonely spirit that is more home
more companionship, more true
than any water washed shore.
Is it an internal streak flying across their heart
that refused them to be defined by a name?
No label telling them, roam here – not there?
Do they ever long for waves and tides?
Do they ever wonder, forlorn, what grander
shores were waiting never for them to adorn?
And why is such a wondering not a wandering
back home, the home they ought to know
rather than the home that knows them now?
What makes a seagull call the desert home?
Is it anything… or is just that they got lost
and that is how they were found,
by home.