As Spring Journal approaches its close, the perspective shifts once more. The language of war becomes increasingly abstract - data sets, models, targets - systems designed to calculate outcomes at a distance from the lives they affect.

In this penultimate instalment, Mark Fiddes contrasts that world of digital precision with something more fragile and human: memory, dream, landscape, the sound of bells across water. Written in Dubai as events unfold, the poem registers how easily experience is translated into numbers, and how resistant the human imagination remains to such reduction.

Like Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, the sequence gathers these opposing forces - the mechanical and the personal, the calculated and the felt - into a single, uneasy awareness.

Tomorrow we publish the final part of Spring Journal.

You can read the full sequence on our blog and Substack pages. If the project resonates with you, please share it and help spread the word.