A pigeon just arrived smart, a loner looking for a drink and a respite from the demands of pigeonry. Water, strut, flutter, regroup, hiding in a medieval courtyard cloistered, or maybe taking a vacation, like me. She is pink or white in the light, tattooed albino, not like the others, a flock of steel gray brothers and cousins just outside in black and white, pecking for seed, loaf, leftovers, their necks jutting back, forth and sideways. I wonder if she is of royal lineage, an arrogance in the arc of her neck. Beating hearts, blood vessels, white chalky poop, she was once alive and homing, magnetoreceptor in her beak as primal GPS with a 2.5 oz cargo load. The first air-mail and Fedex, pigeon posts were war-time backup plans for when machines failed men. Now in the square, the flock multiplies, swirls of gray paint, a living carpet of beggars strutting underfoot and at cafe tables, a nuisance. But they were laid off, made redundant and sadly not reskilled. Now silver cables coil undersea, fiber optic lines connecting continents send our SOSes and I love yous while pigeon dust collects on sidewalks.
workLIT Memo:
I wrote this poem in an ancient courtyard in Granada, Spain. The pigeons were real, not imagined like the one generated by AI above. But I think that’s the point. I don’t want to become a pigeon, do you?