Stranger. Light. Sunset. Three poems and the quiet journey of the heart

Sometimes poems speak to one another before the poet realizes they are having a conversation.

I wrote Stranger first, then Light, and finally Sunset. I did not write in a sequence. Each poem arrived in its own moment, with its own images and emotions. Yet when I look at them together now, I see some form of connection between them.

A journey from being lost, to finding light, to entering the stillness where the heart begins to whisper.

Stranger: Finding Our Way

Stranger begins with disorientation:

Out of place

Out of time

I lost my way.

There are times in life when we can be surrounded by familiar things and still feel like strangers to ourselves.

In the poem, that feeling of being lost expands into different landscapes—the rainforest, the desert, the ocean. They are very different worlds, yet each carries the same sense of searching.

Until someone appears.

Until I found you.

The discovery is not simply about finding another person. Something changes within the speaker, too. Place and time begin to make sense again.

And the poem ends not with I found you, but with:

And I became

Myself again.

Perhaps some encounters do that.

They do not give us a new identity. They quietly take us to somewhere within ourselves that we had forgotten.

Light: When Someone Becomes Part of the Landscape

Then came Light.

The landscape has changed. We are no longer wandering through rainforest, desert, and ocean. It is night now, and the world is filled with stars and reflections.

Wonders of the night

shine,

float,

shimmering

on the sea.

Light is everywhere, but it gradually becomes more intimate.

The stars become beams of light. And then:

They are simply you.

There is something beautiful in the way poetry allows a person to become part of the natural world.

Sometimes ordinary language cannot quite contain what we feel. So we turn to stars, oceans, sunsets, wind, and light. Not because the feeling is less real, but perhaps because it is too large—or too delicate—to name directly.

At the end of Light, there is a small change that matters.

The light is no longer shimmering on the sea.

It is shimmering on my sea.

The landscape has become personal.

Sunset: What Remains Unsaid

And then came Sunset.

This poem feels quieter.

Quiet hours

Quiet hearts,

And the sun sets.

There is still movement. Giant waves roll deep. The sky holds orange, yellow, and blue. The sun and waters meet.

But beneath all that movement is stillness.

And within that stillness:

The heart whispers.

Perhaps that is where these three poems have been leading.

Stranger searches.

Light recognizes.

Sunset listens.

By the final lines, the journey has moved away from finding something outside ourselves and returned to the private realm of the heart:

In the stillness of the night,

The secrets of the heart

Are inked blank pages.

There is a contradiction in inked blank pages that feels true to me.

A blank page should contain nothing. An inked page should contain words. Yet sometimes our deepest feelings seem to exist somewhere between the two.

They are written inside us, but remain invisible.

We know they are there.

We simply have not—or cannot—give them words.

The Conversation I Didn’t Know I Was Writing

When I wrote these poems, I wasn’t consciously creating three parts of the same story.

But perhaps writing sometimes understands something before we do.

Looking back, I can see a movement through them: from displacement to belonging, from darkness to light, from searching outward to listening inward.

There is also a recurring presence—the natural world.

Rainforest. Desert. Ocean. Stars. Light. Waves. Sunset. Night.

Nature is the language I choose to express my feelings and thoughts which are difficult to explain directly.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons I return to poetry.

Not everything the heart carries arrives as a complete sentence.

Some things arrive as an image.

A stranger.

A beam of light.

A sunset.

And some remain, quietly, on those inked blank pages.

— Sandra Medeira

Discover more of my poetry and writing at sandra-medeira.com⁠.