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.
Amy Dugmore
How much water did you have to drink this morning?
Did you sip your coffee without worrying
about its diuretic properties? Was it sunny
where you were?
Hannah Linden
I was cutlery left out in the rain, rusty
by morning, a side-slipping fiddlestick
desperate for music, starved for company.
Eve Chancellor
Imagine waking up one day and discovering
that you are a horse. At first, you might not
believe it and think you are dreaming.
Ananya S Guha
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
Peter Leight
Instead of Dying I’m Taking a Trip
to Kansas
where the light appears
as if walking through a gate
in the air
Daniel Cartwright-Chaouki
Its timber frame held together by the waste
of its own decay
The rot a kind of glue undisturbed
Cracked panes of glass hold their fractures
Rosie Jackson
I Am Trying to Love Frank O’Hara More
I really am! I am trying not to see his exclamation marks as cheap melodrama and his endless conjunctions as some kind of separation anxiety or fear of mortality for what do full stops signify except dying
Charlotte Holm, Jennifer A McGowan
A leaky drainpipe drips
creating damp patches on uneven paving,
slime green algae blossoms
forming viridescent ripples
James McDermott
if samsara’s concrete please don’t come back
as black jackal for I live in Norwich
nor spineless worm as I don’t have a lawn