The Lonely Crowd will feature new work by a different poet each month throughout 2026. For January, we are delighted to publish three new works by Angela Graham. The first of these, ‘A Plan for the Development of Gaza’, is published today with two more poems to follow throughout the month. 

A Plan for the Development of Gaza

What does the sand feel?

Dumped over bodies hustled into shallow graves,

hurled up to heaven by contemptuous bomb blasts,

blown across bulldozed olive groves,

trampled by a million footsteps

displacing themselves along the Gaza coast,

the sand feels nothing.

It was made to be moved.

Formed from the crushing of large things into small,

it believes that all things will be ground

smaller and smaller till they disappear.

Angela Graham was a runner-up in the 2025 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Culture & Democracy Press will publish her third poetry collection, Exposure, 75 poems on war, media and democracy in February 2026, having published her second, Star in 2024. Her 2022 poetry collection, Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere and 2020 short stories, A City Burning (Edge Hill Prize longlisted), are from Seren Books. Angela is from Northern Ireland. She won the Poetry Prize in the inaugural Linen Hall Ulster-Scots Writing Competition, 2021. She has had an award-winning career as a film maker and screenwriter in Wales. In 2022 she received an Honorary Life Fellowship from the Institute of Welsh Affairs for her work on media and democracy.

Main image: John Lavin.