Gulls

Good Dr. Brown, he fell in love with a girl with sleeves of such rosy silk

But her dark eyes roved away, away like the soaring gulls on the wine-dark sea

One night he begged she be his bride but she said, “No, it can not be.

Just like the gulls, with their hungry cries

I love you less than the wine-dark tide.”

How he did brood on such cruel words and those rosy sleeves of shining silk

Then he took a rock and threw it high

And knocked a gull from the wine-dark sky

In twilight dusk, in a black eel ditch, the doctor burned wormwood and pitch

And with a fist of graveyard dirt he begged the night for that wine-dark heart

There she came with those rosy sleeves to touch his lips with such a wine-dark kiss

His black top hat to the breeze it went and his flapping arms grew feathered thick

His face it stretched to a sharpened beak

And how he screeched to feel the wine-dark wind

But though he flapped and fought to fly those rosy sleeves held him, oh, so tight