Yuet, Vian Chiu, Hong Kong's National Honour
October 2026
The HOME Intrusion
To the spider,
The eight-legged felon scales the plaster wall,
A silent ghost in uninvited flight.
No mortgage paid, no rental fee at all,
It mars the pristine drywall of the night.
With silken threads of dubious design,
It weaves a tariff on the living space,
Crossing a clear, domestic picket line
To squat within my architectural grace.
I raise the slipper — righteous, swift, and dread
To smite the phantom of the corniced shed.
And as the chitin crunches on the floor,
A metaphysical debate begins.
The dying creature gasps beside the door,
And tallies up humanity's dark sins.
"You kill with malice," sighs the flat remains,
"With cold philosophy and crimson veins.
My venom comes from nature’s ancient code,
While yours is brewed in malice, down the road."
It lectures me upon my moral scale,
While kicking metaphoric bucket-pail.
Had I possessed a coat of plush and pink,
Or fluffy ears that bobbed with gentle grace,
Would you have paused a microsecond's blink?
Before decreeing murder upon my face?
If standard eyes had sparkled like a star,
Instead of clustering in eerie rows,
You’d call a cab, take me very far,
And gently guide me through the window-knobs.
If cotton-candy webs replaced the gore
Of trapped mosquitoes on the pantry floor,
You’d name me 'Fluffy' on the kitchen rug,
And serve me sugar water in a mug.
Instead, I bear the geometric curse
Of radial vision and a bristling spine.
Your prejudice is ancient, deep, and worse
Than any predator of my design.
You love the cat that dismembers the mouse,
Yet banish me from your suburban house.
The symmetry of terror rules your mind;
To eight-legged beauty, humankind is blind.
You judge the wrapper, never mind the soul,
And kick the ethical and cosmic goal.
If one should count the bodies in the wake,
Whose ledger drips a more extensive red?
How many lives do human empires take
To butter toast and butterflied-up bread?
The slaughterhouse hums softly down the street,
Where bovine shadows meet a tragic end,
While you sit chewing animated meat,
And calling every golden retriever 'friend.'
You drown the planet in a sea of oil,
And turn the oxygen to toxic soil.
Yet here you stand, triumphant over my dust,
With rolled-up paper towel in your grip,
Fulfilling some ancestral, vengeful lust
With every single computational drip.
I only hunted flies of petty size,
While you construct atomic lullabies.
Who is the monster in this parlour game?
We share an equal, sanguinary shame.
You wear a scowl of self-righteous disdain,
While I leak hemolymph upon the grain.
A sliding pane of glass was inches nigh,
A portal to the green and leafy lawn.
You had the chance to let the spider fly,
To watch me vanish at the break of dawn.
A gentle nudge with index card and hand
Would satisfy the laws of common grace,
And exile me to some exterior land
Far from the borders of your sacred space.
Instead, the squish — definitive and loud
Reduces cosmos to a dusty shroud.
I am no martyr, merely collateral,
A victim of your domestic hygiene,
Caught in a logic that is bilateral,
Though only one of us can use a screen.
You stand above my twitching, broken frame,
And mumble apologies into the floor,
As if regret could expiate the blame,
Or sweep the evidence beneath the door.
The guilt is yours, though I am out of breath:
A petty tragedy of parlour death.
Ten legs, eight broken — wait, the count is wrong,
Spiders possess an octadic design,
Yet in the dying meter of my song,
An extra pair disturbs the rigid line.
Perhaps it counts the limbs of him who smote,
Or counts the casualties of modern man:
The moral compass sinking in the moat,
The shattered logic of the human clan.
We lie together in the dust and grime,
Victims of space and executioners of time.
The final verdict echoes on the tile,
As consciousness dissolves into thin air.
You look upon the carnage with a smile,
Or hide yourself in unavailing prayer.
The room is quiet, free of silk and tread,
The wallpaper is safe from wandering feet,
Yet something in the atmosphere is dead,
And victory is bittersweetly neat.
So sweep the remnants out upon the stair:
No mercy lingered, and none enter there.
Score: 76.96 out of 100.
Read the October 2026 National Honours