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.
Stephen Keeler
Among the joys of love was when we got
our first apartment on a boulevard
above the trams and tree-tops and the wires
that cut the street like tangram puzzles and
Khairina Anindya, Genevieve Beech
‘Khair’
At the feet
of al-Ka‘ba
you asked for a daughter.
‘BIRTHLIGHT’
You are ordinary
to the teenager on the bus,
the doctor at our six-week check.
Linda McKenna
We set about him with rifle butts and spades,
waiting our turn alongside our enemies,
the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered
feet. Met where our camps, the same
Abigail Ottley
She remembers the house of her husband He’s not, as they said he is: loathsome, most monstrous. He has a strange and sinister beauty. His eyes are obsidian, shot through with gold, a ruby burning in each. A noble brow, and magnificent cheekbones. You can...
Frank Phelan
I am most visceral
when being disarmed
by a song, a lyric
written and sung…
in the broad New Yawk vowels
Katherine Duffy
The ferry pushes the sea,
forces a long, white reply
that speaks of where we’ve been
Audrey Cotterell
In a corner chapel of the abbey
I lit a small candle, and sent the flame
as a message only half composed
Dylan Foster
there’s not much you can do
when the planets
are telling you to stop
Jeff Skinner
Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line
of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped.