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.
Adam Flint
All summer automatic exits remain
open, and no one leaves or boards.
David Van-Cauter
You are pleased to see me
in my gothic T-shirt –
those bats, you say, have been your friends.
Mark Wyatt
yes of course/ it was idyllic, reclining (pint of/ cider in hand) poolside in the harvesting/ sunlight
Catherine Shonack
when confronted with vast, endlessness of the ocean
who wouldn’t go mad?
Ansuya Patel
Women scrape coins from their purse,
count pennies, one lifts up a watermelon
in mid-air like raising a newborn to light.
Pippa Little
a woman’s rage cannot raise the dead
but it may split stone like lightning
Abiodun Salako
a boy grows tired
of dying again and again.
i am building him a morgue
for Thanksgiving.
Patrick Wright
It’s as if the dream
is telling me we are still joined
somehow, despite waking
and me trudging on, even though
your voicemail is off, your locks
changed.
William Collins
We carry the shame of Paragraph 352D
folded into suitcases at foreign borders,
where love is questioned like a crime,
and disbelief stamped heavier than visas.
They tell us to run for our lives —
but only if we can do it quietly.