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.
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Being quiet and easily tired by being alive among people, I take
the cowardly route to community. I curate a digital garden of oddity.
At best my phone is a menagerie of queers: trinket makers, amateur
playwrights, witches, and, over and over again, my own personal monarchy.
Maryam Alsaeid
Maybe after your bath—
you will sit for a moment,
the towel will hold you close
like a quiet prayer—
Steve Komarnyckyj, Anna Bowles and Lynnda Wardle for Holocaust Memorial Day
where I saw you praying through the angle of the door
Now hangs only in my mind I breathe on its glass wipe away fly specks
Annie Wright
Sing silver times, shimmering columns
of light on the wine-dark, temple
to moon-eyed Hecate, the insatiable.
Magnus McDowall
We rolled out on Seven Sisters Road,
two crates of Tyskie empty in my stairwell.
We were talking from the chest, walking backwards
crackling air above our heads like streetlights
Yucheng Tao
But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
nerve, a soft-boned
species hums
Sarah Boyd
He’s a house of cards, a delicately balanced pyramid
held together by hearing aids and dusty bifocals and
wobbling dentures and ageing pacemaker and
shirt with three buttons missing in action and
Samantha Carr
You became obsessed with nucleated red blood cells when you peeked through an
aperture window at your liquid, viscous nature. You became obsessed with maps
Helen Akers
we’re trying to construct a frame for this
‘highly reactive impulsive emotion’
the nurse is looking into it