The Cartographer

He does not shout. He charts.
Where treaty lines once hung like old nets,
he inks the deep, the dark, the yet-unmade.
The map bleeds where his stylus rests.

Tested: the pipeline’s buried nerve,
the cable’s woven thought, the seabed’s mute.
A sanction’s fence is walked around at dusk.
Gold finds a glove, oil a longer route.

This tyranny is glacial, patient, cold—
Not chaos, but a calculus of grip.
The chessboard not reset, but slowly tipped,
Until the opposing pieces slide and hold
According to the tilt he has conferred.

The outrage is a season. He observes
from a fixed latitude of stone.
He counts not in our headlines, but in years,
in shifted baselines, and in soil owned
By quiet, incremental fear.

We watch the play of shadows on our screen—
The brutal, distant fire, the stark crime.
His power lives between what is and seems,
in the enduring patience of the scheme,
the soil that remembers given time.

He trades in facts he quietly creates:
A city’s dust, a pipeline’s latent sigh.
His monument is not in heated speeches,
but in the altered way we calculate
the distance to the border of a lie,
and what we must believe to call the sky
still shared, and not a territory,
measured, parceled, waiting to be signed
into a different, colder history.

David I. Hughes is a UK-based writer working across poetry, short fiction, and lyric non-fiction. His work explores attention, power, and systems of listening, often rooted in landscape and contemporary life in Cornwall. His debut novel, The Listener, was published in 2025. He is currently submitting his work to journals and prizes.