# Lloydkade

*We're diving into personal history in issue #289 of your weekly poetry shot*

By [trpplffct](https://paragraph.com/@trpplffct) · 2026-03-27

poetry, history, maluku

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> _The cold quay  
> welcomed a stowaway  
> into his new reality. Life  
> shifted halfway across  
> the planet._

The Lloydkade is a quay in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. There still are mooring bollards lining the street, but they are no longer in intensive use. Seventy-five years ago, my dad set foot on European soil right here. He had been a stowaway on the Goya, a ship sailing from the East Indies colony of The Netherlands that was soon to become Indonesia. He had left his tropical home to make a new life in the colder parts of Europe. He would never return.

My father came to The Netherlands in a time filled with uncertainties amidst a changing world that had just started healing from World War II. That healing took a long time, and had its ups and downs. It even looked for a little bit after the 1980s that we had actually managed to put dark periods like that in our past. A relic of history. Unfortunately, now again, we seem to be pulled back by people who see The Other as a threat. People who want more money, more resources, more of everything for themselves only. The Others are not the threat. The ones telling you that, are the real threat.

_In the header of this issue, you can see an image of the Goya._

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Arjan Tupan is writing poetry, podcasting and incubating empathy
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Entrepreneur, dad, European, story teller, poet. Curious, too. I tell stories on different platform and using a variety of tools. Sometimes I explain how I do stuff.Most of my content is free of charg

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### Poésie de la vie

My father was born in the Moluccas, an archipelago also known as the Spice Islands, because of the unique spices that natively grew there. Like nutmeg:

[![](https://paragraph.com/editor/youtube/play.png)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMJ16czgdXc)

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*Originally published on [trpplffct](https://paragraph.com/@trpplffct/lloydkade)*
