Today’s choice
Previous poems
Poetry from Gurmeet Kaur, UEA’s Birch Family Scholar 2025/2026
Heathrow flight lines
I kill lines of ant. Heat arrives
in the wrong season. It feels important
to know the names of birds under
the thrum of a flight corridor.
Birds collide with machines,
causing damage, risking delays. Who counts
bird deaths? A drone’s movement:
hover, ascent, glide, return.
Every spring and autumn, birds
meet in the Mediterranean Basin.
Raptors, storks, cranes, swifts.
Confuse military radars, challenge interceptors.
Radars wasted. What wasted means.
A drone identifying. Zooms in. Flashes.
Movement disappearing. Hot evening.
It’s a lie that birds wake at dawn to sing.
I have never heard them stop, they speak all night.
Gurmeet Kaur is a poet and critic from London. Her work has appeared in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Cordite, Sydney Review of Books, Best of Australian Poems, and more. She is the ninth Birch Family Scholar at the University of East Anglia where she is completing her MA in Poetry.
Sarah Nathan
The ash that screams into the night,
the lake that dries, the child amongst the rubble,
the heat, the fire, the lack of books,
Anna Bowles
Akademichna Street
is bombed-out flats, is
the hot-pink Sweet Bakery Café, is
straggly new-planted trees, is
Philip Athans
Never shows up late to a single thing he’s invited to
Always brings the most thoughtful and carefully curated and perfect gift
Never shows up early and never once overstays his welcome
Always appears well groomed and clean and appropriately dressed
Michelle Diaz
This is just a woman,
sticking her life back together
after years spent recovering.
Autumn Richardson
What you are –
bodied light, a store of oil
a hive of warm blood
Rebecca Parfitt
In the back of the taxi on my way to the hospital,
thighs clenched together,
the driver asked me,
Samarth Agarwal
Here — in the absolute zero of space — fireworks!
Look how the crucibles of creation,
those million coloured fingers that stretch light years —
Jenny Scoones
We unlearn how it felt to touch
And resume our separate days in shirts and trousers,
Like hazmats against the sun and its longing,
The moon with its underbelly pulls.
Matt Bryden
Now a blanket is spread, offerings
of chutney and shin bones,
a taper held to the fire
that heats the tar beneath our boats.