If earlier entries in Spring Journal have traced the unease of living through conflict, today’s instalment turns toward something more enduring. In cities across the Middle East, the call to prayer continues to mark, among other things, the passing of the day, a rhythm older than the present crisis, gathering together voices, routines and lives into a shared moment of attention.

In this tenth entry, written in Dubai as current events unfolded, Mark Fiddes listens to that call as it carries across the city: over cricket pitches and cafés, poetry readings and late-night conversations. For a moment, the divisions of nationality, language and circumstance are held in suspension.

As in Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, Fiddes' poem moves between the historical and the immediate, but here it arrives at a kind of fragile affirmation: a recognition of the ordinary human effort that keeps the world moving, even in uncertain times.

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Stay safe wherever you are.