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.