The Pigeons
Odalisques, odalisques,
Treading the pavement
With feet pomegranate-stained:
When we’d less years
We bartered for, bought you—
Ah, then, we knew you.
Odalisques, odalisques,
Treading the pavement
With feet pomegranate-stained!
Queens of the air,—
Aithra, lole,
Eos or Auge,
Taking new beauty
From the sun’s evening brightness.
Gyring in light
As nymphs play in waters—
Aithra, lole,
Eos or Auge!
Then down on our doorsteps,
Gretchen and Dora …
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 29, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The Pigeons” was included in Padraic Colum’s poetry collection, Creatures (Macmillan, 1927). About the poem, Zack Bowen, an internationally-recognized scholar of James Joyce, writes in his book Padraic Colum: A Biographical-Critical Introduction (Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), “The usurpation-freedom motif is a prominent feature in Colum’s ‘creature’ poems. Some creatures like ‘The Little Fox’ and the pigeons are abused, pathetic figures much like their human counterparts. The freedom of these two species has been usurped so that the fox finds himself on a leash and the pigeons have been domesticated and poorly used.”
Padraic Colum
Padraic Colum, born Patrick Collumb on December 8, 1881, in Columcille, County Longford, Ireland, was a poet, playwright, folklorist, and children’s author. The oldest of eight children in a family struggling financially, Colum received only eight years of formal education. At seventeen, he passed an examination for a clerkship in the Irish Railway Clearing House where he worked until 1903. It was during this time that Colum began to write.