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.
Kathleen Gray
When she asked what I wanted
to be when I grew up, my mother
laughed when I said ‘free’
Viv Fogel
At the End of the Class
The young woman in a hijab thanked/praised/appreciated me
For all I had shown/ encouraged/ inspired in her
Asked whether I observed/ took part in/ celebrated Rosh Hashanah?
David Bernard
I wrote the title of the lesson on the board and underlined it with a flourish. The class listened to my introduction.
Colin Pink
I used to ‘see’ you when you were alive,
I mean when you weren’t there. I carry you
around like a photo in a wallet.
Lottie McCrindell
All summer the sun scorched the city
and the sky held back its tears.
Roz Doe
The night before,
I paced London’s streets
sparkling and fizzing with ideas
the pills used to dull and destroy.
I felt awake, alive.
Iris Anne Lewis
And so I went into the owl.
Eyes, green as moss,
darken to black. Oak tassels
spell-woven to feathers.
Nairn Kennedy
You notice the nose: webbed veins spritzed
with little flicks of red, purple blotches
daubed with a palette-knife, broken ends
where blood-vessels gave up the ghost.
Jason Ryberg
Still Life of Fish and Bird