For their young, they dug a burrow,
Restless work that blunted claw,
And wore down keratin, as they shifted stones
Near to the entrance, leaving two columns,
Like Moai statues, the final teachers of their young
Before they leave, blood-spurred, for four years of exile,
Grey-beaked among the waves, during winter storms.

Yet before the father spent spring hunting for a grassy bank
To make fit for his partner and their shared kin, he, and she too,
Also knew the Atlantic night, and how death-nearness feels
Because the churning sea made it impossible to feed:

It was molting season, and, as new feathers grew,
Flight became an impossible remedy,
The sole choice: brute survival.
A necessary panacea.

And, just seven years ago, emaciation was truth,
As tens of thousands died, helpless
Above slow sub-marine whorls, spurred by change,
A hospice bed for the hungry.

The burrow is empty now, their child fled under cover of darkness,
Following the moonlight, to delight, their feet a rudder,
During plunging searches for herring, hake, capelin, and sand eel,
To delight, in clumsy strides atop the sunlight zone, and belly-flops
And tumbles before rest, to fear the hunger known early
In their soft bones, to fear, their death the cost for another to live.

And if they survive, they will soon be weather-blind to their parent kin,
And, arrayed in fresh orange and yellow hues, they will also dig
New burrows, as their fathers did, or fight to own the houses of the dead,
Then they will return over a score of years, in pairs, to wait, and to endure
Two months, spent furtively to yield a new player in a hungry circus,
And they too then will run the ceaseless crucible,
Their melancholy eyes: illustrative gyres of what we all must do for love.

And each year I watch them, while baking bread, in the monastery kitchen,
And I am glutted by the sea-heavy air, overlooking the white cliffs,
And this year, when their parents failed to return,
Briefly I joined those cliffs in their wind and water lapping song.

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