Today’s choice
Previous poems
Sylvia Banham
Pigeon Politics
Pigeons have invaded the garden, two then four, then a flock.
They roost in the apple tree to nest, reconnoitre or mate
ignore my sorties to deter them and shit without stint
on patio and herb bed, foul lovely hyssop and thyme.
Their droppings soil plant pots, the al fresco table and chairs
and the crumbling path I must tread to the washing line.
In mating they have no finesse. Coy, the female resists.
The male pecks her then mounts her and is done in a trice.
Puffed up and portly, they waddle yellow-eyed down paths
turning their heads side to side, vigilant garden police
unlike the robin who listens, head cocked, when I greet him,
or the blackbird virtuoso whose arias at sunset entrance.
Even their handsome grey silk with its sheen of purple and green
seems commonplace now, an assertion of the power of the flock
amongst shyer or dowdier birds, nuthatch or sparrow.
Pigeons inspire not joy but a sharp rap on the window.
Sylvia Banham has had poems published most years since 2016 in Ver Poets members’ ten liner pamphlet, occasionally in the Ver annual prize pamphlet and also in their fiftieth and sixtieth anniversary anthologies in 2016 and 2026.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
What matters now is the feast of this survival.
The glory of our own light, black light.
Look at us: the deeper the root, the sweeter the juice.
Glory of the blacker berry, split wide open to the sun.
Robert Billinski
the sky met the water where the birds met the fish
the sky met the water where the fish met the birds
the sky met the birds where the water met the fish
Gordon Vells
Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.
Patrick Wright
i protest say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through
all this again you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings we’re mulch
& nothing but endless fucking
L. Haiman
My baby is hungry. Grabs
me with both hands. I am
an apple, apparently no will.
Francis de Lima
Oh London. U useless city. Map to
nowhere land. Tight stretch
open eye. The underground metal.
The night tube. The railway. Smog
Over coaltrip. The presence
Of machine upon machine. U
Miriam Swales
When I was 12, I knew the weight of a human head.
8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (a bit of dark comedy).
It grew from there. The curiosity. The calculations.
Alison Pritchard
By what rough science
were you given
this migraine of a name
Matt Gilbert
Disgust springs up from the guts
to meet a sprinting lump
of furry muscle.