By Charles M. Sumid      Copyright 2025      Written 2025

The river stone places itself.

Not on the board but in the garden
where she tends a different game.

Black river rocks from Kamogawa,
white marble from Carrara.

Each placement took seasons to consider, years to understand.

Visitors see randomness: stones scattered like thoughts across moss.

She sees patterns,
reads how power pools in corners before flooding the center.

This cluster near the tea house:
semiconductor wars, Taiwan building fortress patterns
while competitors fought for quick territory.

That single white stone, surrounded:
Nokia in 2007,
perfecting hardware while digital influence
was building at the edges.

Her students come for Go lessons, leave understanding something else.

“Why does black resign?” they ask about positions that look balanced.

She walks them through the garden.

“Here,” touching the stone placed decades ago,
“this is when the monopoly knew it had already lost.
Years before the breakup, the pattern was complete.”

They think she’s speaking metaphor.

She’s reading what was always there:
how power moves like water,
finding the lowest place first, then rising to drown kings.

New stone in her palm today.

She’s watched the tech giants circle each other,
sees in their moves an older game:
dynasties ending when strength becomes brittle as jade.

Places it where the shadow falls at market close.

Another prophecy only she can read.

The moss will grow around it, make it seem
like it was always there.

Which it was,
in the pattern that plays itself out across centuries.