I met a pigeon on the street the other day
his eye bruised and swollen
his feathers sparse
the toes of his left foot torn
a stump left
dragging on the pavement
the other pigeons huddled together
further away
as if they didn’t see him
or never had
still, he stood there
silent
calm
“what keeps you going?” I asked
“mostly stubbornness and spite,” he replied
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city bird by Dimitrios Kokkinos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License