_(with the twist: “Come Together”)_
Miss Harriet Hobb was a difficult child,
Unruly in manner, unkempt and wild.
She never came promptly when called by her name,
But dawdled and drifted and played at a game.
Her parents would summon her softly at first,
Then louder (for Harriet’s hearing was worst).
But Harriet laughed with a terrible glee:
“They’ll come if they want me, they always find me.”
One evening at dusk, when the lamplighters stirred,
Her mother called out, but no Harriet heard.
Her father called too, with a voice like a bell,
But Harriet whispered, “They’ll manage quite well.”
She wandered instead to the edge of the Green,
Where shadows grew longer than shadows should be seen.
The air felt peculiar, the hedgerows too still,
As though something waited just over the hill.
Then softly, so softly, a rustle began,
A sound like a footstep without any man.
A whisper repeated her name in the air,
Not kindly, nor cruelly, but terribly there.
“Come to get her…” it murmured, with delicate grace,
As though it were smiling without any face.
“Come to get her…” it echoed, a fraction too near,
A voice made of twilight, of hush, and of fear.
But then, with a shift like the turning of weather,
The whisper grew plural: “Come… together.”
The shadows around her drew closer in pairs,
As though they were climbing invisible stairs.
They gathered beside her, behind her, before,
A silent assembly that asked for no door.
And Harriet, foolishly proud of her wit,
Stepped closer to see where the whisper might fit.
They found her next morning asleep by the stile,
Her shoes full of thistles, her face in a smile.
She never again let her parents call twice,
For something else answered, and wasn’t as nice.
So children, attend to the lesson we set here:
When someone calls gently, you’d best lend an ear.
For those who ignore every summons and letter
May find many voices will come… together.
Jan 31
Jan 31, 2026 at 12:20 AM UTC
No drums.
No missiles lifting their shoulders from the sea.
Just a communiqué, plain as snowfall:
The old men are gone.
The mirrors have been removed from the hall.
Beijing wakes differently that morning.
Not louder.... quieter.
A silence that means something has ended.
The new leadership speaks once, briefly,
as if afraid excess words might summon the past.
Taiwan is not a prize to be seized,
but a wound made worse by shouting.
We choose kinship over conquest.
Fleets remain in port.
Maps are not revised.
The Strait exhales ....
a century of breath held too long.
In Washington, Brussels, Tokyo,
analysts blink like men stepping from caves.
They check for tricks.
There are none.
Then the second message lands ....
not softly, not loudly ....
heavily, like a door finally closed.
We are finished with ritual hostility.
Finished with the theatre of resentment.
Finished with pretending the twentieth century still owns us.
Sanctions melt into paperwork.
Threat matrices collapse into footnotes.
The Cold War’s grandchildren
feel suddenly underdressed.
And then,
without crescendo, without apology,
comes the line that tilts the planet.
Siberia is Chinese.
Not by anger.
By history, by hunger, by necessity.
By the long arithmetic of civilisation.
No tanks move.
No banners rise.
Just contracts rewritten, pipelines redirected,
railways bending east like sunflowers.
Russia hears it first as disbelief,
then as vertigo.
Not invasion ....
inheritance.
The forests, the gas, the metals sleeping under ice ....
all named, all counted, all claimed
with the calm voice of a banker closing an account.
Moscow roars, as it always does,
but the roar echoes oddly now,
like shouting into a room that’s already been emptied.
Because something obscene has happened:
China has joined the rules
and then rewritten the board.
The West, stunned, realises too late
that morality and interest
have briefly aligned ....
and alignment is dangerous.
NATO speeches grow careful.
UN language becomes surgical.
Everyone understands the same terrible truth:
This is not expansion.
This is realignment.
Russia, for the first time since Peter the Great,
faces the unthinkable choice:
Fight the future
or be absorbed by it.
And the world watches, unnerved,
as the old axis snaps
not with a bang
but with a bureaucratic click.
Somewhere, a child in Taipei sleeps undisturbed.
Somewhere, a miner in Yakutsk realises
his wages are now paid in yuan.
Somewhere, an admiral stares at a map
that no longer argues back.
History, that unreliable narrator,
clears its throat.
Not all empires fall to war.
Some are outgrown.
[email protected]
29 January 2026
Jan 31
Jan 31, 2026 at 12:18 AM UTC
Existence is both a horizon
and an indictment.
it is swimming in the sea
where we saw the dead whale,
permeated by memory
and endowed with a sense of place.
it is marriage and ***********
rather odd and indelicate,
it is the pitch and yaw
of once satellites,
in sheer idleness
and unemployment.
it is bloom and sprawl
in every direction,
planting roots,
it works against the edges,
fades into a rosy blur
in the corners of the subconscious.
it is accretion,
but often more preoccupied
with enhancing existing spaces
rather than conjuring new ones.
the longer we live, the further
our central drama falls away
from the frame,
and the more attuned we become
to the shifts happening
at the corners,
the markers of erosion.
everything is alive, yes,
but only for a moment or two.
Jan 27
Jan 27, 2026 at 7:26 PM UTC
Truth shows up,
walking through clover
thick enough to stain my cuffs.
It never learned my name.
The air feels like too much,
sweet and careless,
stuffed with honeysuckle
and soft light.
My heart can’t hold it all,
like I’ve won the lottery.
Death walks beside me,
slow, patient,
hands in pockets,
whistling something,
like it’s got nowhere better to be.
He doesn’t speak,
doesn’t judge,
just moves through the sweetness,
like it’s all old hat.
The sky cracks open,
orange spilling into pink,
so loud it makes my head spin.
I try to drink it in,
my hands shaking,
like I’m trying
to hold a fistful
of clouds.
Every step feels borrowed,
like I’ve got too much
and not enough
all at once.
So I keep moving,
feet pressed into the dirt,
hands tasting the wind,
heart too full for my own good.
I know it won’t last.
I know the colors,
the smell of clover
and soft light
will slip through my fingers.
And still, I walk,
eyes wide,
drunk on everything,
because there’s no other way.
Jan 26
Jan 26, 2026 at 4:29 AM UTC
there is a crack in everything;
the burden of ballast, walking
barefoot on the surface of the sun;
waking up in that dark immortal
furnace, outside your locked heart,
to step through the copper door
again and again,
the only way out is through...
Jan 26
Jan 26, 2026 at 4:28 AM UTC
I drenched my sorrows neat,
on the veranda in this stifling heat,
while the rest of ‘Stralia’s dying, trying to fight bushfires, floods, and other catastrophes —
I sat there flipping pages in cookbooks, sweet,
where I dreamt of all the delicious morsels I’d eat,
the pages torn, and I’d sworn I would complete,
One of those meals - with ingredients I simply couldn’t keep;
anchovies, patté, and fish eggs are no such treats,
but dream, I do of the alter-me in the 1950’s fulfilling society’s beat...
Jan 26
Jan 26, 2026 at 4:27 AM UTC
When they’re little,
they make your arms ache,
with the heft of them,
the warm, wriggling certainty
that you are the whole horizon
they know how to trust.
You learn the choreography
of lifting and lowering,
the sway that soothes,
the half asleep hum
that says stay, stay, stay.
Your body becomes
a harbour,
a hinge,
a place where small storms
break and settle.
You carry them
through doorways,
through tantrums,
through the long nights
when the world feels too sharp
for such soft skin.
And then,
quietly,
as if time were a tide
you didn’t notice rising,
they grow.
When they’re big,
they make your heart ache,
with the distance they must travel,
with the questions you can’t answer,
with the choices you can’t lift
out of their hands.
You learn a new choreography:
the stillness of watching,
the discipline of stepping back,
the strange ache of pride
and fear
woven together like threads
you can’t separate.
Your love becomes
a lighthouse,
a long-distance blessing,
a steady beam
they may or may not follow
but always know is there.
You carry them
in the quiet places,
in the pause before sleep,
in the sudden memory
of their small hand gripping yours,
in the way your breath catches
when they walk away
toward a life
you helped build
but cannot inhabit.
This is the secret truth
no one warns you about:
that love begins
as something held in your arms
and ends
as something held in your chest,
heavier,
vaster,
and impossible to put down.
For when they’re little,
you ache with the weight of carrying them.
When they’re big,
you ache with the weight of letting them go.
And both aches,
in their own way,
are the shape of love
doing its lifelong work.
Jan 26
Jan 26, 2026 at 4:26 AM UTC
I learned, this morning, that my Grandmère’s tiny,
designer tote is a ferriday bag.
Mary, Mary, are you worried?
What does your browser know?
Your clicks, your likes
your secret midnight swipes,
are those things others should know?
What about the things you buy,
the posts you read, your favorite feeds,
the secrets you type, then backspace zap,
are tracked, like the buttons you tap.
Your ephemeral searches, the links you try,
uneraseable, without the reasons why.
It stores your trail, reads your mail,
with ever watchful digital eyes.
Mary, Mary, have a cookie.
What does your cell phone track?
The trips you plan, the maps you scan,
your location with accuracy GPS,
friends you text, the songs you select.
The news you read for ‘free,’
the streams you prefer to see.
Our gadgets know our rhythms
and feed the hungry algorithms
which sell our interests bit by bit,
and tweak the clever, coded rules
that predictively model your moves
before they’re consciously known to you
pushing that valuable data to Internet databases.
Mary, Mary, quite uneasy, what do your gadgets do?
they connect you to the world and the world to you,
They tease and ****** you but they also **** you.
Those apps - with your permission - watch and listen
to things you say, people you know and places you go.
.
.
Songs for this:
Cookie by NewJeans
Private Eyes - the bird and the bee
Jan 26
Jan 26, 2026 at 4:20 AM UTC