QuietVerse Digest Issue #1

Publish Date: 31 January, 2025

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🧭 Core Poetic & Reflective Departments

✍️ A Quiet Line

“Even unspoken, I burn.”
— Secrets from the Quiet Verse

🌱 From the Garden

Desire

the sweet promise of blossoms 
drifts over winter's dregs 
where the ground thaws 
the crocus of spring begs

💌 What I’m Carrying

I wrote 'The Life We Never Knew' as a wistful reflection on the final going home at the ultimate end. I questioned how life would be different had I not left, or returned sooner.

“turning back time, we choose
the life we never knew.”

The line fits here—not as regret, but as ache for a love life never lived. From "The Life We Never Knew" in my collection Cape Breton Poems, which I plan to publish.

📖 The Verse

The Ache Before the Bloom
(for the one who never knew)

I wanted love—
not fireworks,
but the hush of spring
before the thaw.
I wanted you.

Not in grand gestures—
but in the way
the crocus waits
beneath the snow,
unseen, still certain.

You lived inside
each slow return of thought,
in the hum between
heartbeat and hush.
Not near—
but always there.

Your words,
those gentle sparks,
trembled something
rooted deep in me.
My breath shifted.
My pulse leaned forward.

You were my sun-warmth
in a season that had none—
a promise
not yet promised back.

When I thought of you,
my heart swelled
against its frame,
as if it might
break free,
find your chest,
and nest there—
soft, trembling,
unwelcome.

I wished—quietly—
that you could feel it,
the way the soil aches
before the bloom,
the way the body knows
what it cannot name.

I loved you
without asking,
and still
you did not come.

I only wish—
for one moment—
your heart might bloom
with the ache
mine carries alone.

🕊️ A Gentle Prompt

What longing have you kept quiet—until now?
Sometimes the ache doesn’t ask to be fixed—it just asks to be named.

• ✍️ Write it without apology.
• 🌱 Let it bloom a little on the page.
• 📩 Optional: send it as a letter you won’t send, or a poem no one needs to read but you.

📚 Rooted Reading

Emily Dickenson: Collected Poems

We talk of Echothreads in the QuietVerse, those mysterious links to past, present, and future. Curious are the roots we hold dear.

Emily Dickinson—my 10th cousin once removed, I recently discovered—wrote with a clarity I envy.

“There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes”

She truly knew winter—this line carries the hush and heaviness of late January. (You might notice I borrow her signature dash style—)

🪞 Echoes from You

Love Note

This month’s echo comes in rhythm—a poem of gesture and groove, reminding us that love sometimes asks only a note—and the courage to write it.

The Valentine note has probably been around longer than the earliest written words. I bet if we looked at cave walls, we’d find an expression of love etched into stone.

Love Note is loosely based on the rhythm of “Love Train” by The O’Jays. A cheerful reminder to speak the love we often carry silently.

Bought a box of chocolates
Carefully slipped a note inside
Told my love I still adore her
Left no truth I had to hide.

People everywhere love them—
Reach out—
Write a love note, a love note.

The story I tell makes hearts open,
I pick up my pen—let the silence be broken.
I leave a note on Valentine’s Day,
Just to say: You’re still my way.

People everywhere love them—
Reach out—
Write a love note, a love note.

🔗 What We Sow

"A letter never sent..."

Write a poem inspired by an unsent message. These folded-away words—never delivered—hold something sacred. Love. Regret. Memory. Hope.

This February, I’ll be posting one poetic prompt each day on poetrycove.com. Perhaps one will stir a message you've long kept sealed.

🪶 Story Seeds

• “Not everything buried stays gone.”
• “You never answered, but I still heard you.”

🌤️ The Light Between Posts

Not Empty, Just Quiet: On the Power of Silent Poems
from Wisdom of the Quiet Muse

Some poems don’t raise their voice. They pause. They breathe. They leave space between the words—and trust us to listen.

“I paused / and let the stillness / be my steps.” — from “Winter Strength”

“My strength / arrived quietly…” — from “Inner Strength”

“I began to trust / the silence, / the pause...” — from “Doubt”

Quiet isn’t absence. It’s presence. It’s the ache before the bloom.

📚 In-Depth & Editorial Departments

🧠 Deep Quiet

The Bloom That Doesn’t Come – Living with Unanswered Brotherly Love

“Even a bloom that doesn’t come changes the plant.”

🌿 Opening Reflection

There’s a kind of ache that doesn’t scream. It just lingers—quietly, insistently—like a bud that never quite opens, a frost that never fully leaves the ground.

We rarely talk about it. What becomes of us when siblings bloom in different gardens—too far to touch, but rooted in the same earth?

🌱 The Ache We Don’t Name

• Sometimes, a seed never meets the soil.
• Sometimes, weeds grow too thick to see what’s blooming beneath.
• Sometimes, the gardens stretch far apart—and love goes unseen, but not unlived.
• Other times, it’s love we never spoke aloud—the feelings tucked into poems and unsent letters.

“There’s a subtle shame to it. As if to love our brothers and sisters without return is foolish.”

🌾 The Growth We Don’t See

Unanswered love deepens us. It teaches us to feel with no agenda. Sometimes it gives us our first poems. Other times, our greatest acts of grace.

“The crocus pushes through the snow whether anyone sees it or not. And so do we.”

🍂 Letting Go of Closure

We love tidy endings. But real life is more subtle. Some loves don’t end—they just stop being spoken out loud. And still, they matter.

“You don’t need someone else’s ‘yes’ to prove your love was real.”

🔁 What We Do With What Remains

All that unreturned feeling? It can still bloom—through art, through quiet reflection, through love offered to the self.

“Not as a second choice— but as a sacred reclamation.”

🕯️ A Soft Invitation

Tonight, light a candle if it helps. Ask yourself:

• What love never spoke its name?
• Where has my tenderness gone, if not into my brothers and sisters?
• What bloom within me is still waiting to open?

“Some blossoms never unfurl—and still, they scent the soil.”

📜 Notes from the Archive

In 2013, I published Valentine’s Desire. It had heart—but little editing. This year, I revisited one poem and gave it a quieter voice, inspired by Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas.”

The Original (2013):

You should know that I've been praying
For more than candy hearts with sayings
Chocolate takes me higher
But a sugar rush is no desire...

The QuietVerse Revision (2025):

You should know that I've been praying
For more than candy hearts with saying.
Chocolate lifts, then fades away—
But love should linger, not just play...

This new version is less about charm, more about presence. I may write a free-verse variation next—one that leans into silence and emotional stillness.

🪞You? Have you ever revisited a love letter—one you wrote, or hoped to receive?

🫂 Personal Life & Real-Time Threads

🧣 Threads from My Life

Found

I study the morning glories 
circling the vintage mug,
rotating in my hands
and memories flood in.

Decades have flown by.
This is all I have of her now—
a simple ceramic mug 
I gave to my mother. 

From my small hands 
For Mother's Day 
the year before she passed
into the next adventure.

📦 Life, Unboxed

I have incompletes—tasks left too long. They linger at the edge of my sight.

Letters Unsent

They glare—
the perfect pile 
neatly addressed 
and properly stamped.

I shiver 
at the grim message— 
sent by the unsent

The time passed 
I have no value
for the unsent—
stale dated 

I felt better 
cathartic exercise—
Best left unsaid.