I wake to a duotone picture—
pink lake and clouds,
gray mountains, diving gulls.

Then sunshine reaches ’round Bell Mountain,
catches the birds, illuminates them bright white.
More seagulls than usual this morning,
delicate as tissues floating from the sky.

One comes close to my window,
rhythmic wings with black tips.
He dives toward his reflection,
an image so clear on still lake,
it looks like two birds will collide.

Their morning chores complete,
fifty or more flock harmoniously at the sandbar.
Yet on the water, they go solo.
Each glides alone, trailing a gleaming wake.

Gulls winter here.
Like all fleeting things, they’re special to me.
But, in this January of record lows,
why didn’t they venture farther south?

Maybe the birds come for the same reason I do:
to dance among mountains,
where melodies—migrated on lips and fiddles—
still hover, preserved for gull generations
and for those who join their ancestral reel
through crisp Appalachian air.
?

This poem first appeared in Echoes Across the Blue Ridge (Winding Path Publishing, 2010).
Used here with the author's permission.