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The Lantern at Low Tide 

At the pier’s end,

a lantern swayed in the wind,

its light holding back

the dark by inches.

The tide had gone out hours ago,

leaving the seabed bare —

a map of ridges and hollows

drawn by hands no one remembers.
Somewhere in the shallows,

a fish turned once,

as if to read the lantern’s flicker

like a message meant for it alone.

When the wind dropped,

the light kept moving —

as though the night itself

had learned to breathe.

The Salt Lens

They ground the crystal
with salt in the slurry,
each grain a star’s ghost
dissolving into glass.

Through it,
I could bring Saturn close enough
to see the shadow of a moon
crossing its face —

but the lens fogged
on nights when the sea‑wind rose,
salt reclaiming
what it had given.

At its clearest,
I saw my own eye
reflected in the dark between its rings,
and knew the map I sought
was also looking back.

.

The Loom of Salt

The warp is taut,
white as a winter shore.

I pass the shuttle —
each weft a coastline

I will never walk again.

The selvedge darkens;
the cloth drinks the tide,
and begins to vanish.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Astrolabe of Regret

I set the brass to north,
the needle quivers —
a tremor I pretend is wind.

 

Each degree a year
I failed to turn back.

 

At dusk,
the fixed star
is only a smudge of ash.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Margin note: “Merchants once navigated by these same stars; some never returned.”)

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Prequel: The Alliance Road

(Levantine Chronicle — Prelude)

Croesus still wears his crown,
the Pactolus still runs gold,
but eastward the horizon darkens.

Messengers ride from Sardis,
hooves drumbeat the spine of the world —
through Cilician gates,
past Tyre’s purple looms,
down the coast where cedars lean to the sea.

In Gaza’s dust they change horses,
in Pelusium’s shadow they bow to the Pharaoh.
Gold meets gold,
and the bargain is struck:
Lydia and Egypt,
two suns to hold back the rising east.

The Levant listens —
its markets thick with rumour,
its ports weighing the wind.
Phoenician oars dip in and out of the tide,
carrying news faster than any envoy.

In Yehud, the elders speak softly:
alliances are walls built far away,
but the armies that test them
march through your own fields.   

The road is busy now —
grain for the Nile,
timber for the palaces of Sardis,
and in the other direction,
whispers of a king in Persia
who does not wait for spring to make war.

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Corridor of Empires

(A Levantine Chronicle)

Croesus falls —
golden Sardis quiet under Persian boots,
the western buffer broken.
From the Pactolus to the Halys,
the road bends south,
its dust already scented with cedar and myrrh.

Babylon still holds the river cities,
Judah still dreams in exile,
but the tide is turning:
Cyrus takes the gates without a battle,
and the edict rides the wind
back to Jerusalem’s stones.

The Levant listens —
a strip of earth between sea and desert,
its harbours open to Phoenician sails,
its caravan routes stitched
to the looms of Egypt and Anatolia.
Every army must pass here,
every god must learn the names of its hills.

Persia rules with satrap’s seal and royal road,
until the horsehair helmets of Macedon
spill down from the north.
Alexander drinks from its wells,
leaves Greek in the mouths of its markets,
and marches on to the Indus.

Rome comes like a tide without ebb,
paving the coast with stone,
naming its provinces,
planting its eagles in the courtyards of temples.
The corridor endures —
a prize, a tax, a prophecy.

Centuries turn:
Byzantine chant,
Arab call to prayer,
Crusader hymn,
Ottoman drum.
The Levant remains the narrow throat
through which the world swallows its own history.

And still the dust remembers
the day Croesus fell,
when the road from Sardis bent south,
and the corridor learned again
that no empire passes without leaving
its shadow in the stones.

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Croesus in the Comment Box

(a companion to “Poems for Money…”)

Croesus, old coin‑king,
you sit in my comment box
polishing your metaphors in gold leaf,
telling me the platform fee is “just the cost of doing art.”

But I’ve seen the gates,
how they swing only for those
with a credit card in the lock.
I’ve heard the hallow of poems
that never make it past the paywall,
their syllables still warm in the mouths
of poets who can’t afford
to spit them into the feed.

You say, “What’s a few coins for immortality?”
I say, “What’s immortality to the unheard?”
In Lagos, in La Paz, in Lahore,
there are verses that could split the sky,
but the sky here takes payment in advance.

Croesus, you measure worth in minted weight;
I measure it in the tremor of a line
that makes a stranger’s chest ache.
Your treasury is full,
but my currency is breath —
and breath should not be billed.

Still, I post what I can,
slipping lines through the cracks
between your gold‑plated rules,
hoping one will land in a reader’s hands
like contraband joy.

And if you ask me again
why I won’t pay to be heard,
I’ll tell you this:
because the richest poem I know
was written in the dust,
read aloud to the wind,
and carried farther than your coins could ever reach.

"—in the quiet tide"

an unread poem
is unwritten poetry —
ink still dreaming in the vein,
a slow current beneath the skin
where no light has yet entered.

Pages breathe in the dark,
their margins uncreased
by any gaze,
their fibres holding the faint salt
of the tree’s first rain.

They live in the quiet tide
before the pen descends,
in the pause
between heartbeat and word,
where silence folds itself
into a listening shape.

In the shadow‑scent of paper
                             waiting
to be touched by thought,
you can almost hear
the hush of unwoken syllables
turning in their sleep.

Some drift closer
to the shore of speech,
their edges foaming with consonants,
                 then slip back
into the mind’s undertow —
a retreat as deliberate as arrival.

Perfect in their unspilled form,
they are a library of ghosts,
each spine uncracked,
each title a tide‑mark
on the inner coast.

                              And we,
keepers of this unbroken harbour,
                                  carry them —
the weight of what has not yet been said,
the shimmer of what may never be —
bound in the quiet tide
    that moves through us,
               and returns,
   and moves again.

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I am not the benevolent Oz, great or otherwise —
no levers behind velvet, no emerald gates to dazzle the credulous —
only the stubborn machinery of my own making,
a few cogs greased with irony,

    a crank that squeaks in the key of

                 don’t take this too seriously,
                         until the hum you mistake for a hymn
                    becomes the wind over a toppled statue in the sand.

Once, its face wore the smirk of a ruler certain he’d outlast the sun.
The words at its base still shout about greatness —
but there’s nothing left to rule but air and grit.

Your fawn‑eyed devotion is touching,
in the way a moth’s devotion to a porch light is touching,
and just as doomed.

Look on my works, ye Mighty — and bring a broom;
                             the dust is winning,
and the curtain you thought was closing
was only the desert swallowing the stage.

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