✍️ By Riaan M. Odendaal
They say magic happens at the edges —
where water meets shore,
where twilight holds both day and night,
where strangers become friends.
In the spaces between countries,
where borders blur like watercolours,
a wheel turns — not by grand machinery,
but by hands joining across distance.
This is not the loud magic of stage lights,
but the quiet kind:
a well where once there was thirst.
A school where silence once taught nothing.
A clinic where pain had no answer.
The magic of Rotary lives in ordinary rooms
where coffee cools as plans warm,
where businesspeople find themselves
becoming something else entirely:
architects of small mercies.
There is a tide in human hearts
that rises best in company.
When we gather, something ancient wakes —
the memory that we were never meant
to carry our portion of the world alone.
So the wheel turns:
In Bangladesh, a child drinks clean water.
In Peru, a woman opens her first ledger.
Here, in this room, we pass a hat,
tell stories, laugh — seemingly small moments.
But the wheel needs every spoke to turn.
I have seen valleys flood after modest rain,
watched single seeds become abundant fields.
So too with these meetings, these pledges,
these quiet evenings of possibility.
The magic is not in grand gestures.
It’s in persistence.
It’s in showing up.
It’s in the sacred mathematics of shared burden.
One hand cannot lift the world.
But many hands, joined around a wheel,
can move it forward —
inch by gentle inch —
toward something very much like love.
— Riaan M. Odendaal, 2025
— Rotary International Poet of the Year 2025
