The Quiet That Spoke: 7 Poems in 7 Days

And the Courage to Share What You Hear

In a world increasingly dominated by the digital and artificial, there are people creating work that exists outside that machine.

There are still people taking creative risks—offering something raw, personal, and real. People like Mohammed Sami, the artist nominated for this year’s Turner Prize. His paintings are stunning in their emptiness: no figures, just haunting interiors and dreamlike landscapes that speak to his experience of war and exile. His voice comes through without needing to be literal.

An image from After the Storm, Mohammed Sami’s solo exhibition at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England (2024)

To have a voice, artists need clarity of vision—and the courage to share it. Tanya Shadrick wrote this in The Cure for Sleep:

“Where does it begin, our turn away from risk and adventure? Why do so many of us hide in routine, shrink from opportunity?… For if the events which wake us are sudden, what leads to a sleep of soul and possibility is harder to trace.

We have to go back through all the tales told to us (or by us) about the world and its workings: that bramble thicket in which we lost our will and way.”

By awakening “soul and possibility,” we begin to recover that voice. That vision. That creative instinct so often buried beneath expectations and noise.

Outwrite Project

On 7th May, I decided to try something new. I began my Outwrite Project.

The idea is simple: I write outdoors, by hand, for up to 30 minutes every day. Why? Because consistency is the only way to improve—and because I wanted to see what might surface when I gave myself that kind of space and rhythm. I wanted to be shaped by my physical surroundings rather than the digital ones I so often inhabit.

Here, I’m sharing what I wrote between Monday 12th and Sunday 18th May.

Each piece is like a sketch: a glimpse of whatever was stirring just below the surface. Think of them as creative postcards—small, spontaneous missives with the hope that one might trigger an idea or spark something new.

Even if you’re not usually drawn to poetry, I hope there’s something in the act of sharing these handwritten, honest, unedited—and dare I say it, ‘unmonetized’—pieces that resonates.

For me, handwriting a poem outside each day is how I begin to find my voice. It helps clear away the tales I no longer need—the ads, the algorithms, the constant distractions—and opens up a little space to breathe, notice, and speak.

Maybe that’s what this whole project is teaching me: that to really find your voice, you have to be quiet enough to hear it—and brave enough to let others hear it too. It’s not always comfortable. But clarity comes when we stop trying to impress, and start trying to listen. And maybe, if we’re lucky, what we share will speak to someone else’s silence too.

Like all poems, the ones that follow are best heard—or read—aloud.

Monday 12 May 2025

And so—an empty carriage

15 seats

4 doors on either side

And of course

The endless people come

The predictability of the capital

Peace is fleeting

Silence is hunted

Slow is rejection

And it occurs to me that not only

Don’t we see

The readers of books

So few, scattered among the heads and phones

Even rarer still

Are the people with a pen

Writing a sonnet on their way to work

A love letter to their partner

Or a story of betrayal and conquer

The people with a pencil

Doodling a dress

Creating a portrait of a passenger

Or designing their lottery winning home

And so—where are the dreamers? On what hill did the dreams die?

Did we all leave them behind, in our departure stations, our old schools, our forgotten childhoods?

Where must they be when all we see

Are people hungry for peace

Silence and a life that finally slows?

Maybe dreams aren’t lost at all

But etched in our frowns and deflated lungs,

In the pauses of conversation and sips of political debate.

The weariest of city dwellers must

Surely not be so different

From the ones that Dickens and Collins observed

Who Potter would envisage as rabbits or foxes?

We still move on their tracks, weep like their memories and squeeze lives together like the rats beneath us.

And so—maybe all the dreams are simply trapped

Without a pen, and no pencil to call them home?

The mighty phone has won,

Loved to an almighty obsession

Consuming all attention and

Vacuuming all creation.

Till we’re all simply empty

With 4 talents abandoned

And 15 opportunities unnoticed.

Filling our every moment

With chaos, noise and momentum.

Tuesday 13 May 2025

The emptiness of the clouds

Descends

Unannounced

Immersing the soul

In a dew of memories

Forgotten

The world becomes askew

And all that remains

Is a fog

No past, no future

Just a present without gifts

And then, just like that

One day

Far away

The clouds decide its time

To rise

And the soul breathes again

Unstifled

Untangled

Stretching its vision, anew.

Wednesday 14 May 2025

What is writing after all

If were flying through stars

Or crawling the breeze

A search for sustenance

Unlike any creature

We hunt for words

That elude our lies

We pray forgiveness

From a past that

Only we recall.

What is writing after all

If it begins in a question

So small

If we’re walking the earth

Or climbing our ladders

A search for survival

Like every career

We find the words

That reveal our lives

We pray acceptance

In a future that

Only we envisage.

Thursday 15 May 2025

Teenagers next to me

Discussing university

Make up, sunglasses

Dreaming of their future

While analysing photographs

Unaware of the world

Before them

After them

How degrees lost their value

How religion lost its influence

How declaring your regular prayers doesn’t equate to virtue

Yet they speak, so loud

Of their habits of adherence

Observing the teachings

And questioning so little

Making a performance

Of their inherited beliefs,

A thing for public display, not personal sustenance

Reminded, so powerfully

Of the 1990s

Judging, judging

I observed their observations

And still, little has changed

The university conversation

The photos discussion

All show, show, show

But where’s the sustenance?

It wasn’t there 30 years ago

And still I search for it

While they search, still

For status, symbols

A shallow display

Pleasing their parents, pleasing a culture, prioritising performance

Moral grandeur

Without awareness of our insignificance

Our miracle

How society runs on community

Not masks of goodness.

Friday 16 May 2025

Contemplating pretty

I wonder what it means

When it increasingly

Ages backwards

Unnaturally

In plumped lips and brows defined

I wonder where’s the awe

When skin isn’t allowed to tell its stories

And eyes, forbidden

From laughter

Shock becomes frozen, flattened ground,

And joy doesn’t shake, doesn’t wobble

Contemplating ugly

I wonder when it turned

Thrilling, full of middles and endings

Ages forwards

In mapped faces and thighs

Fattened

I wonder how it happened

When lying became permitted

In perceptions of pretty

That only children

See transparent

As acting and temporary

A façade over all that means

Love and beauty.

Saturday 17 May 2025

There’s no honesty

In words

If our eyes fail to

Smile

When our hearts start to

Squeeze

And our breath catches up

To the violence

The visions we see online

Of injustice, without vision

There’s no humility

In silence

If our pauses succeed

In denial

When our stories hide what’s honest

And our sketches are the faintest

Shadows

Without colour, light or darkness.

Sunday 18 May 2025

Yes, they ruin your life

Desecrate it

Until its unrecognisable

A grenade smashed

By a tennis racquet

That seemed so eloquent

And romantic

Your life, the one you grew so

Accustomed to

Explodes into a thousand

Sparkling memories

Fondly recalled

During sleepless nights

And soundtracks of shouting, plastic, sand

Bouncing, balloons and parties

Oh—so many parties

Not the fun kind

They were obliterated

Now, they’re early, monotonous and LOUD

Not in a euphoric way

Under the rubble, stains, vomit

And oh—so much poo

Your new life whispers

One day, to you

In the laughter, love and tears

That the earthquake was

Oh—so worth it

A blessing, an angel, a disguise

For something more to come

A life unrecognisable

Built from your children’s lessons

Of what life really means

When it’s not all about you.

—

Thank you for reading.