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.
Jason Ryberg
Still Life of Fish and Bird
Mark McDonnell
Fascinated by the priest’s teeth I don’t realise
I’m kicking the pew in front with a restless foot
until someone taps me sharply on the knee.
James Mason
In Italian I have no inner life.
With no past or future tense
My needs are immediate.
Claire Miller
rose is thirsty
rose senses water
rose root rummages in the earth
rose root punctures lung and frontal lobe
rose stem is a green straw sucking
Sylvia Banham
Pigeons have invaded the garden, two then four, then a flock.
They roost in the apple tree to nest, reconnoitre or mate
ignore my sorties to deter them and shit without stint
on patio and herb bed, foul lovely hyssop and thyme.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
What matters now is the feast of this survival.
The glory of our own light, black light.
Look at us: the deeper the root, the sweeter the juice.
Glory of the blacker berry, split wide open to the sun.
Robert Billinski
the sky met the water where the birds met the fish
the sky met the water where the fish met the birds
the sky met the birds where the water met the fish
Gordon Vells
Impotent in family life and ineffectual at work,
sometimes he would spend a full quarter-hour
just circulating the mini-roundabout on his moped,
dizzy from the power of blocking everyone else.
Patrick Wright
i protest say how when i’m gone i’d like to rest before the choice to return & go through
all this again you sigh as though that’s absurd & endings are just endings we’re mulch
& nothing but endless fucking