Robin Holmes believes that growing up on a small hill farm in the Mourne Mountains has been a deeply formative experience for his writing. In his poetry he explores themes of the natural world, the life of birds, the changing seasons and man’s problematic relationship to the environment. His work has appeared regularly in the Bangor Literary Journal and the annual Community Arts Partnership Poetry in Motion Anthologies. Video recordings of his poems ‘Psithurism’ and ‘Fred Dibnah’ are available on the Bangor Literary Journal’s YouTube channel. His poem ‘ The Swans of Gaza ’ was longlisted for The Seamus Heaney Prize for New Writing in 2024.

His debut anthology The Shedding Gate was published by Impspired in April 2024.

Herring Gull

a week of Atlantic gales
has left you haggard and hungry
yet ecstatic on finding my breadcrumbs
-	-    -        until now I had thought of you
as devoid of  enduring charms
low on the list of avian muses
your gangster waddle scaring off
          all other hopefuls
you yield your glowing beak
       as a military sabre
you wear those shining webbed feet
   as a pair of marigold gloves
         you stare at me 
from the fierce bead
 of those cranberry eyes

yet it is we             who have created
the depleted seas    the vanishing shoals
        which keep you hungry
which keep you screeching
as you overlord trash cans
      scavenge on tips
dive bomb on the heads of casual tourists
      devouring their fish and chips

and so I admire your tenacity
the slow silent waltzes you carve
into the face of unrelenting gales
nesting against formidable odds
   on     rocks- cliffs- crevices
your colonies repeating       like Warhol’s cans
condensed from an amniotic sea