Years ago, I did not set out to write The Poet. I set out to listen.

A good friend once told me, “Tshombe, keep a journal nearby; you will be inspired to write something sacred.” So I bought journals for this very writing—long before I knew what would fill them.

For a long time, this work lived as the quiet framework beneath Desert and Sea, but it always felt like it was meant to be something more sacred than simply my story. Something was speaking to me. It wasn’t a story. It wasn’t a philosophy. It was a breath that kept returning whenever the world fell still enough for me to hear it.

I didn’t know then that I was listening to Silence itself.

I had been stealing away into the quiet moments of my days and nights to give it attention, but this was different. Not the kind of silence that follows noise, but the kind that precedes creation. The kind that holds intention before it becomes breath. The kind that teaches without speaking. Some of you who write know exactly what I mean. The kind the that I learned from Hebrew scriptures call dumiyyah—a Silence that is alive, aware, and waiting.

This book began there.

Writing The Poet required a kind of surrender—a willingness to sit with my own fractures, to let Silence reveal what I had covered, to let the metaphors teach me before I tried to teach anyone else. In many ways, this is the most sacred thing I have ever expressed in my expressionist life.

It is absolutely different from anything I’ve ever published, yet not unfamiliar. It has been with me for years, waiting for its moment. And that’s the thing—time matters more than method. When is more important than how or what. So yes, I am on time.

People often ask what the book is “about.” I never know how to answer that. The Poet is not about anything. It is an encounter. A cosmology. A meditation on the quiet forces that shape us. A reminder that we are all carrying breath that did not begin with us.

If anything, this book is a conversation between the seen and the unseen. Between the poem and the Poet. Between the child and the father. Between the self and the Silence that holds it.

And now that it is complete, I can feel another movement gathering—something deeper, quieter, older. Something rooted in dumiyyah. Something that wants to speak through the unsaid.

But for now, I am resting. Listening. Letting my consciousness commune with what comes next.

Because every book I write begins the same way— not with a word, but with a hush.

I wanted to share this in advance of the impending publication of The Poet this week.