A Favorite

i thought this was in my poetry book but i couldn’t immediately find it. It is one of my favorites. While going through yet another folder of stuff, writing mostly, throwing most of it away, i ran across the original. It was written in a wheel book while my ship was en route Pusan, Korea from Vietnam. On December 31, 1970, i finished it on a flight to Seoul after we had docked in Pusan, and eventually tore out the pages and put them together with a paperclip.

Now, i have to go through that poetry book again to make sure it’s not there.

one hundred miles at sea
this morning
i saw a gull
flapping white
against the cold, harsh rays of sun
and
tremolo wind,
whitest i’ve ever seen
out of how many thousand,
i wonder;
the gull was captured
in a prism of time
from which i shall soon escape
and
then watch the mockingbirds.

1 thought on “A Favorite

  1. Since i have an account with Barnes & Noble, i went there looking for your book of poems. They had it and i ordered it for my NOOK a few minutes ago. Now i can settle back and begin reading when i get off here. Thanks Jim. My family is fine as we are staying home. My granddaughter goes to work, but is fanatic about cleanliness as she is afraid of giving the C-19 to us oldsters. We went to a powwow meeting at the first of the month and the tornado damage at 109 and down Leeville pike was really bad. It hurt my heart to see the houses and trees laid to waste. They were lucky no one was killed.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *