Grief’s giant golden gaze
genuine
gloriously gained
Written for the Chimeric Poetry Scavenger Hunt:
Write a Lune as a Tautogram
And also shared with GloPoWriMo 2026 Day 10:
Write your own meditation on grief.
Schwarze Kapelle – 8th October 2026
We had a plan, a plot but then began to worry,
We light the fuse but it started to cough,
Whispered, “Tonight?” but there was no hurry
Then decided, “let’s call the whole thing off.”
We packed a bomb but started shaking,
We signed our names on the molotov,
We swore our country was not for taking,
But once again, “let’s call the whole thing off.”
Canaris schemed, and started to stutter,
The “spirit of Zossen” made Halder scoff,
Smelled the Gestapo behind the shutter,
“Let’s burn the files and call the whole thing off.”
From Munich nights to Stauffenberg’s thunder,
Each bold “Tonight!” turned into “Not enough,”
They feared defeat almost more than blunder—
And so they called the whole thing off.
You want to hear this as a lovely show tune, right?
The “Black Orchestra” (Schwarze Kapelle) was the Gestapo’s codename for a secret network of German military officers, diplomats, and civilians who plotted to overthrow Adolf Hitler. The Black Orchestra’s goal was the total destruction of the Nazi regime from within.
The Black Orchestra was not a traditional spy ring but a loosely organised conspiracy that used key positions in the Abwehr (German military intelligence) as a cover. Members of the group actively worked to sabotage the war effort by leaking troop movements to the Allies, feeding Hitler false information, and trying to warn the world about the Holocaust.
Despite early pleas for help before the war, the Allies refused to deal with them, viewing all Germans as enemies. After the failed Stauffenberg assassination attempt, where Hitler survived with only minor injuries, a brutal wave of reprisals followed. Thousands were arrested, and many of the Black Orchestra’s leaders were hanged or shot, often in the most horrific manner.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
A Higher Pleasure
Nothing so pleasing as wisdom itself
Be careful what you wish for
Some other pleasures are powerful magic
That leave us wanting more
The Meta-Zone – 7th October 2026
Awed by eternal inflation
brane strings me along
In infinite miniature
a brain fractures in fractals.
Where am I going?
Where have I been?
Nice to meet you, Mae—
'Is that a universe in your pocket
or are you just pleased to see me?'
Shared with dVerse Quadrille #257: A Pocket in Your Poems, using The Meta-Zone from the comic book Shade The Changing Man and some words and phrases taken from string theory, pointing towards the idea of a pocket universe.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
A Selfish Reason To Be Good
The person doing wrong wrongs themselves
Never does the wrongdoer feel great
Ask if the result is really what you want for yourself
Because catharsis is not all you will create
Final Desire – 6th October 2026
The first century was the hardest.
Love's thin, translucent hands withered,
leaving a map of blue veins
leading to the graves of my children
and their children too.
An undissolved stone remained lodged in my throat;
a monument to sorrow and grief.
Life is long, while lives are short.
The stone hardens into something quieter;
a permanent hum of melancholy.
I sought adventure as distraction,
learning not to love the impermanent;
the candles easily extinguished with a breath.
Recognising patterns as inspiration for movement,
this golden age has gone.
Time is long until time is short
and wisdom may be lost to boredom.
Having seen it all before,
histories so often repeated;
sandcastles forever falling to the tides.
I long for the end;
the only desire left.
Do I really want to live forever? Do you want to live forever?
With all our history at our disposal, why can we not put ourselves into the immortal’s shoes and see the folly of our actions? All the books written, the songs sung, all the stories told – they all say the same thing.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Looking Out For Each Other
Let’s celebrate each others’ successes
We don’t play a zero-sum game
Jealousy is not what one possesses
When treating success and failure the same
And Yet… – 5th October 2026
The body fails us inch by inch, by year,
and we must hold each other gently.
Every day the news is worse than the last.
The dog still wants to play at noon.
We arrive alone and depart alone.
In between, sometimes someone saves us a seat.
The earth is burning, and no one will stop it,
so I'll teach the trees toward a sky I won't see.
All my best thoughts have already been thought.
Someone, somewhere, understood me.
Shared with Poets and Storytellers United #247: Reframing Negative Concepts
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Words Can’t Be Unsaid
Better to trip with your feet
Than with your tongue
You can always get up again
But words cannot be undone
Learn Their Names – 4th October 2026
I learned these names today:
Leigh R. Tate, Jeffrey E. York
The terrorists in suits
can smell the end of days.
The question is:
how can we keep the legions of hell at bay,
when so many monsters already live among us?
The post-colonial arc bends,
inevitably, towards the horizon
Long shadows on the grass
In an insane world,
the only weapon left is insanity.
But the reality of a world beyond the West
is a phoenix.
Black propaganda
has become a translucent mirror.
It’s harder to kill somebody you can identify with…
….and learn their names:
Hana, Fatemeh, Reza, Arya, Ali, Zahra, Ahmad, Hamed, Fatemeh, Mahdis, Athena, Amirghasem, Fatemeh, Arad, Saman, Fatemeh, Nadia, Parham, Mahmoud, Fatemeh, Amir-Hassan, Zahra, Mohammadhatam, Asna, Benyamin, Mohammad-Sadra, Maryam, Liana, Mandana, Sara, Zoha, Esra, Salma, Fatemeh, Zahra, Mahna, Athareh, Alireza, Mohammadreza, Samira, Ehsan, Fatemeh, Zeynab, Mohammad, Reza, Athena, Khadijeh, Roqayyeh, Reza, Marzieh, Mohammad-Mehdi, Mohammadian, Ali-Akbar, Hananeh, Fereshteh, Mohammad-Ali, Parsa, Arina, Makan, Esra
The first stanza is a paraphrase of a page taken from a Judge Dredd comic and there are links to an article paraphrased at Equator.org as well as Joe Nichols blog ‘Sacred Mischief’. At the start, this poem names the two people accused of dropping the bombs in Minab, Iran, that killed 170 children, 61 of whom are named at the end of the poem.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
All For One, One For All
It is an interconnected cosmos
We are citizens of the world, you see
And that which isn’t good for the hive
Also isn’t good for the bee
Dreaming Of Running – 3rd October 2026
Man is sick but he can’t rest
the dog sleeps all day, dreaming of running
Faith is never pure and rarely true
it takes a degree of intellect to behave that stupidly.
A family measures time in dogs and cats
but my stomach and bladder tell me the time
We of the low-style, vulgar horde:
can you imagine the boredom of being a god?
Life has never been so good
and I’ve never felt so bad
I am full of self-inflicted knowledge
I’m nothing, if not a contradictory man
Every translation begins and ends in failure
—ravishing portraits of otherwise
Walking around with the weight of his potential
The poet acts as a guide
Written for the dVerse prompt to break form with couplets, this piece let me use random lines I’d noted down over time. The first and penultimate lines link to their origin. The ‘vulgar-horde’ line is taken from Dante’s Inferno. The ‘translation’ line was definitely appropriated from somewhere now forgotten and the ‘ravishing portraits’ line is by Maria Popova.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
A Mantra Of Mutual Interdependence
The butterfly weaves a whirlwind
As sympathetic stirrings follow
All rivers lead to the one lake
The same waters that we all swallow
There’s No Opting Out – 2nd October 2026
You are a public class that everyone audits
Each slice of you remains a lesson
The observer is busy making behaviour edits
The observed will leave their impression
Respect the gaze of children; they know how to see
We are teaching by our existence
Tomorrow’s normal is today’s complacency
A museum of small acts’ insistence
There’s no opting out of your own exhibition
Everyone browses for their own cues
Influence is ambient, becomes tradition
Good or bad, it somehow all accrues
Another write inspired by a David Elikwu newsletter.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
The Most Valuable Asset
Friends and money are just bluffing
They can come and go with the tide
The wise person can lose nothing
They have everything stored inside
To The Grim Shores – 1st October 2026
As the language of the night settles in,
with a candle raised to the sky.
The way ahead is slippery and sodden
—a vanishing point, a future sigh.
A gloved hand held, we wend our way
to the rolling river, quiet and moody.
The conspiring trees shake their bones
at your subtle ceramic beauty.
Your trusting eyes make no plea
as you submerge under the darkened depths.
Your silken arms are the last I see,
the last twinkling that the moon protects.
I walk with you, across the many bridges
that lead us out to the troubled seas.
I’ll wait for you on the silent shore,
framed in judgement by those ageless trees.
Written for dVerse Poetics and inspired by the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw, whom I’d never heard of before, but can see very clearly an England that I feel very familiar with. While the use of light in the paintings is somewhat seductive, I couldn’t help but let the darkness in with a story of forbidden love ending in quiet tragedy.
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
Let Virtue Shine Bright
Darkness lies on either side
The lamp shines until its fuel is spent
As should your truth, justice and self-control
Until your light faces its own descent
Deadhead in Woolworths – 30th September 2026
Yeah, yeah – it was me, not you,
but I still blame you.
I toiled until my elbows gave way.
I toiled for myself
and you benefited from all I gave.
You only saw another drone.
I shouldn’t have been surprised
that the corporate mentality kicked in.
Here where dollars reign.
Demoted to self-service checkout,
I carved a new little kingdom
where I let thieves get away.
Fuck with me, I’ll fuck with you.
I’ll never go back, never see your face again.
Content that you’re just someone else’s drone.
“Treat people like shit, and that’s what you get” is the phrase that comes to mind with this poem, which I know from the song Deadhead by Crass. Woolworths is where these events took place. Hence the title.
Shared with an AllPoetry contest:
Write about that ONE place you never want to go back to. Only ONE place. Be specific!
Today’s Daily Stoic poem:
