The world wakes to a narrowing throat,
a single strait tightening like a noose
around the century’s windpipe.
Twenty percent of the planet’s breath
held hostage by a corridor of water
no wider than a clenched jaw.
Tankers idle like stalled hearts.
Engines cough.
Markets twitch.
The price of dawn rises by the hour.
And still the giants play their games,
hurling decrees across oceans,
dragging fleets into the choke point,
treating the world’s fuel lines
as if they were strings on a toy.
In the East, a vast nation stares
at emptying pipelines,
calculating how long before its furnaces cool.
In the North, another power smiles thinly,
counting the coins that fall
whenever chaos blooms.
Across the Gulf, cities glitter on borrowed water,
desalination plants humming like fragile lungs
one strike away from silence.
Farmers wait for fertiliser
that will not come.
Ships wait for passage
that will not come.
Peace waits for reason
that will not come.
And the ordinary people,
the ones who light the stoves,
tend the fields,
keep the lights burning,
feel the scorpion’s sting first.
Not the admirals, warlords
or the architects of brinkmanship
who mistake the world for a board game
and the strait for a lever.
The fuse is braided.
The hour is narrow.
The world leans over the map
and hears it ticking.
If there is to be a future,
it will not be built by the fists
that tighten the strait.
It will be built by the hands
that refuse to let this world
be throttled again.
[email protected]
15 April 2026