Pigeons
Poet: B J Buckley
Those fat rock doves everyone scorns
for their desecrations of pompous
statues and the shiny finishes
of expensive cars, their unrepentant
congregations around park benches
wheedling our scraps, dropped crusts aThose fat rock doves everyone scorns
for their desecrations of pompous
statues and the shiny finishes
of expensive cars, their unrepentant
congregations around park benchesnd soggy
french fries, puffed up and strutting like small
generals mustering feathered armies –
miraculous chuff and burble, cloud-soft
storm against our ankles – how varied
voltages of sunlight anodize
their plumage, refractive rainbow
glitter at the throat – and when they lift
to leave us, graced by instantaneous
computation of location and direction –
by magnetic resonance, by sun, by star,
by infrasound: reverberations
of deep ocean waves across vast
distances through water, soil, stone:
then turbulence as delicate as bumble-buzz
disturbs the atmosphere, and brings them home.
B. J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has taught in Arts-in-Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her chapbook, In January, the Geese, won the Comstock Poetry Review's 35th Anniversary Chapbook Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Grub Street, Dogwood, Vita Poetica, Calyx, and Aesthetica, among others. More information and sample poems are on her website: