New Poetry Book: Whispers Between Silence and Light
Whispers Between Silence and Light
Every once in a while, life slows down just enough for us to hear what we’ve been missing. For me, that happened over the last few years—walking quiet trails, sitting by rivers, watching the light change on mountains. Somewhere in those moments, this poetry collection began speaking to me.
The poems in this collection arrived during tiny pauses in life—those in-between spaces where thought slips into feeling. The space before the first whisper, as one of the opening pieces calls it:
“There is a space
between silence and light—
not quite absence,
not yet form—
where breath listens
and the heart speaks without sound.”
That’s really where this book was born. Not in dramatic moments, but in the gentle ones.
The book is divided into six sections—awakening, dreams, love, memory, the earth, and finally, the quiet within. Each section carries pieces of my own journey, but I wrote them hoping readers might find their own reflections inside.
A few of these poems are deeply personal. Others wander outward. All of them try to listen.
In A Sacred Sound, for instance, I tried to capture the way silence at the Shankaracharya temple in Srinagar felt almost like a companion:
“I was quietly trying to listen—
the rustling of leaves,
the whispers of wind,
the fluttering of birds…”
In Water’s Soul, a sculpture on the Hudson nudged me into stillness again:
“I feel the water’s soul—
silent, eternal, whole.
Only light remains—
no river,
no self.”
And then there’s The Dust Within Me, which digs into a very different kind of silence—the silence of forgotten roots:
“I seek my roots beneath layers of dust,
where history sleeps and memories rust.”
Writing this poem felt like opening a door I hadn’t touched for years.
Three poems—Dream: Connection, Dream: Prayer, and Dream: Awakening—weren’t written as a series, but they grew into one. They trace the strange, fragile way dreams tie us to people, to time, and sometimes back to ourselves.
Those three pieces were written months apart, on different continents, in different states of mind. But they kept returning to each other, forming a small internal journey that surprised me.
A lot of this book sits in the tension between presence and absence. Poems like Conscious Love, Unfinished Story, and Between Heartbeats try to make sense of the emotions that don’t always fit neatly into words.
Sometimes it’s just one line that holds the whole story:
“Curve of love
Revealed in twilight—
Woman or mountain.”
And sometimes it's the ache itself speaking:
“I feared my silent thoughts
would disturb the stillness you sought.”
One of my favorite pieces to write was The Dots Now Connect. It moves through decades of memory—Maradona, Neruda, Fitz Roy, Patagonia, my granddaughter, and the strange looping ways life brings meaning back.
“What began fifty years ago—
a dribble, a song, a poem, a longing—
now I see how the dots connect
across this cosmic map.”
This poem, more than any other, felt like writing my own life backwards and forwards at the same time.
Not because the poems are loud or dramatic. They’re the opposite. They’re quiet. They’re the kinds of poems that sit with you in a train window reflection, or the last few minutes of dusk, or the moment before a deep breath.
If even one poem becomes a small companion—a whisper, a mirror, a softening—then that’s more than enough.
May these poems meet you where you are.
May they sit with you gently.
And may you find your own silence, your own light, somewhere between the lines.
This is the last blog of 2025. A few books I've read (and am reading) since August (it was slower than the first half of the year).
Happy Holidays!
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