Guillemots

There's an intruder
in the cliff city
of the guillemots,
a seeker for eggs
of various speckled
greens and blues.
The stunt exists
to show us in our lounge-rooms
how much the Saxons
prized this protein.
You're just home.
I feel relieved
that you haven't
been scaling such heights,
even though you did
steal the indeterminate
colour of your eyes
from these lofty clutches.
You're just home
with the slightest reprimand
from your grandparents
for wearing the wrong clothes
suspended on the air,
a television sea-bird's call,
that fades now
as you turn those eyes to mine.
You do not stop looking at me.
I stroke your cheek
recalling a radio voice form the past:
they called it their tender time.
I reclaim you by this gaze,
your first gift to me,
and I know you by colour
as a guillemot mother
exhausted from hunting
can return to her own eggs, hers alone,
in the vast sea-bird citadel
on the high white cliffs.
There are no raiders yet
and you can wear
all the wrong clothes you want.
Beyond your cradled shoulder
I keep the intrepid egg thief
at a blurry distance.