TEMPORARY EMPIRE

He:

HOW IT CLOSES

By the slow pulse of the canal,
watching the water swallow its own reflection.
Wondering if you remember
the shape of a voice,
the echo of something once held.

Days stretch like ropes pulled taut
until they snap in the heat.
Ships hang heavy in the air,
their names lost to salt.

Melampus
Killara
Scottish Star
Agapenor

I found something small.
Not wood exactly,
a splinter of time.
It doesn't build, not really,
but I fit the pieces together
as if they hold.

The smallest of ships,
in the largest of ships.

Nordwind
Djakarta
African Glen
Vasil Levsky

Fabric, not fabric,
merely skin peeled back from memory,
torn from a life once held in its creases.

I thread what remains,
a knot of air bound to air,
stitches unraveling.

Is there a rhythm to forgetting?
One thread pulled loose,
then another.

Essayons
Port Invercargill
Lednice
Münsterland

String from a cupboard,
a remnant of something that tied
something together.
It frays under my hands.

War did not sever us cleanly,
but left us unwound,
unraveled,
relics of a cause.

Ships lean into the sand,
bodies heavy with waiting.

Nippon
Melampus
Killara
Observer

Not days anymore,
merely strands of light.
Thin as a breath.

I move the pieces,
but the shape is lost,
a shade of something half-made.

The horizon folds inward,
like paper curling in the sun.


TWINE

I found some twine in an old emergency kit
aboard the Melampus.
It’s brittle now.

I wonder if you know
how to tie knots yet,
if your mother taught you
how to make things resist the wind.

I imagine you,
sitting on the floor of your room,
holding this in your hands,
something that could have existed.


SALT

Salt cuts into memory;
this caretaker’s hands
keep the hulls from breaking.
A slow reverence,
half-prayer, half-duty.

This place, too, was claimed and lost,
drawn in lines over water and sand.
Now no nation flies a flag here.
Only dust conquers.

A ship within a ship,
as if you could hold it one day,
sense the weight of my hands in it.
Each scrap a quiet apology,
small enough for you to hold.

Melampus
Scottish Star
Port Invercargill
African Glen

In the end, we do not break;
we open.
In the end, it will let us go,
but keep our shape,
anchored in the desert light.

We project our shadows
onto walls of metal and salt.
Useless maps
of a territory claimed
only by waiting.

No stars to follow.


HOW IT OPENS

And in the end,
the sand will hold our shape,
a hollowed empire half-buried and erased,
our stamps and badges fading to dust.

The lake will keep our names, but gently,
as if we’d never stayed, never built a nation
of yellow-stained steel and borrowed time,
an empire drawn from the desert’s whim.

Nordwind
Djakarta
African Glen
Vasil Levsky

The sand settles across my hands,
each finger a tool against memories fading.
Matchsticks splinter in my palm,
delicate wood forming ribs and lines,
a frail carcass held only by my breath,
moving as if to hold your name.

Thread unwinds, worn down like days,
tied in loops to mimic sails.
Each line is a pulse of forgetting and finding,
a seam of air bound to a name.

My fingers thread the silence,
tangled, yet making something whole –
a weight small enough for your hands.


RIBBONS

Was it a war that stranded us?
Or the long forgetting
of what war leaves behind?
A ribbon of stillness torn to shreds.

I shape it slowly,
though it will never leave these waters,
never know the pull of tide or wind.

But in the long, sun-choked days,
we became something,
not quite a nation,
but drifting, as ships do,
trading water and words,
passing cans of food like currency.

We even stamped our letters,
as if they were real,
as if names scratched into salt
could last.

Melampus
Scottish Star
Port Invercargill
African Glen

The years wore on,
and the ships became more earth than iron,
fusing with the desert itself.

A Yellow Fleet,
fading into the landscape,
while we, too, faded.
Our faces turned to the horizon,
waiting for a war that had long forgotten us.

And yet we kept them alive,
these hulks that merged with the land.
Oil-stained hands scraping rust away,
while the desert claimed their iron bones.

You are a ghost, too,
a name I carve in air.

I imagine you now,
your name buried like ours,
one ship among many,
caught in the same unmoving sea.

On the Vasil Levsky,
movies still flicker
like memories of a home.


She:

EVEN THE SMALLEST THINGS

Even the smallest things they create –
lifeboat races, Sunday gatherings, tattered flags in the wind –
hold more than they can bear.
And yet they are whole there,
each man a moment carried forward,
each gesture a bridge.

I think of the lifeline he carves in wood,
a modest apology fitted with life boats and sails,
the boy’s name painted with Tipp-Ex.
This ship, bound for no harbour, holds him still
in its quiet making – one last attempt to remain.

Here is a child with a carved ship in his hands.
Small enough to hold,
large enough to carry everything.


EVEN THE NAMES

I trace his words like driftwood.
It’s not the war itself, but the after-image that lingers,
like heat on steel long after the fire has passed.

Even the names – Melampus, Killara, African Glen.
Names once spoken over radios and dinner tables.

Matchsticks and thread, not for sailing,
but for remembering.
The slow, persistent tending
of things left behind.

There’s no map for a territory like this.
And yet, he charts it.

His empire was always temporary.
Not because it was weak,
but because it was built
on a truth empires fear:
that to remain is not the same as to conquer.

Not a war story.
A keeping story.
A binding of names to breath.
A way, even now,
to say: we were here.