On Tshombe Sekou’s Dummiyah: Womb of Poetry

There is a kind of silence that isn’t empty. It holds things — unspoken grief, half-formed prayers, the breath you take before you finally say the thing you’ve been carrying for years. In Hebrew, that silence has a name: Dummiyah. And for poet Tshombe Sekou, it is not the absence of poetry. It is the womb from which poetry is born.

Dummiyah: Womb of Poetry is now available, and it arrives as something rarer than a debut — it arrives as a reckoning. It is the latest entry in Sekou’s Desert and Sea Series, and it moves alongside the mainline books Ko’ach, Desert: Memoir, and Adrift: Family and the Poet like a companion that knows all the secrets the others left unsaid.

A Life Lived in Many Languages

Tshombe Sekou was born in New Orleans and raised Hebrew Israelite in Israel — a life already written in two languages, two covenants, two landscapes. He grew up moving between Israeli and Bedouin communities, studying the world’s faiths, learning that language is never just language. It is always also geography, history, and the particular way a people hold their grief.

He served 32 years in the U.S. Navy. He has lived and written from across the globe, lived in the Kanagawa prefecture of Japan for nearly sixteen years before relocating to Tennessee in the United States. He began writing poetry in 2005 — not as craft first, but as necessary release. As reckoning. He describes himself simply as “one who sees the world through language while being a passenger in poetics.” That humility is itself a kind of truth-telling.

What the Book Does

Dummiyah is structured as breath. Four movements — Inhale, Pause, Exhale, Return — move the reader through a cycle that is spiritual, linguistic, and deeply embodied. Sekou draws on Hebrew mysticism, kabbalistic cosmology, and Japanese poetic form, weaving them into something that never feels like a lecture. It feels like being held.

The book introduces readers to the Nishima — a breath-based poem form with a 4-1-3 syllable structure: four syllables inhaled, one held, three released. The form performs what it teaches. Every poem in Dummiyah asks the reader to slow down, to sit in the middle beat, to resist the rush past what is difficult or unresolved. Silence, Sekou argues, is not passive. It is the most active thing we do.

The book is also deeply concerned with the feminine divine — the Shekhinah, the womb as cosmology, the word rechem (womb) as a root of rachum (compassion). In a tradition that has too often imagined God as only external and only masculine, Sekou insists on the interior, the soft, the generative. This is a book that treats tenderness as a form of strength.

For the Reader Who Has Been Waiting

You don’t need to know Hebrew to read this book. You don’t need to know Japanese poetic form, or Kabbalah, or the difference between Chesed and Gevurah. What you need is the willingness to pause. To let meaning settle before rushing to the next poem. To remember — as the book itself teaches — that you were never broken. The gold goes where the light enters the crack.

Dummiyah: Womb of Poetry is available now on Amazon. It is the kind of book that finds the part of you that has been carrying silence without knowing it had a name.

Womb holds the word,

Still —

Poem breathe.