R. Stephen Poetry
Poems
A collection of original verse — quiet observations, gathered and kept.
The Collection
Select a poem to read
Cut Collar
“Being ‘you’ can sometimes come at a price.”
Where Did You Go?
“Dealing with the loss of a father and a friend”
A Lover’s Heist
“You stole the sun from my heart”
The Quiet After
What would her world look like if I disappeared?
When the Room Empties
88 ivory and ebony voices
Small Boats
Voices carries across saltwater
The Words I Owe
A quiet confession at the edge of fear.
Time
A first attempt at naming the fear.
Where Did You Go?
Grief spoken without polishing the edges.
Surprise View
Where memory and meaning meet.
Reverence
A walk with the man I miss.
Woodland Concord
A hope for peace in a divided world.
A Corduroy Armchair
Grief, memory, and the objects that outlast us.
A Cycle of Reckoning
A dark descent into power and surrender.
A Sombre Exchange
A quiet collapse of love and leaving.
An Ode to Pinot Noir
A playful descent into desire and decadence.
Burn Out
A quiet portrait of exhaustion and devotion.
Carrion Bell
A first step into the dark.
Christiania
A wander through the free town.
Deliverance
A collision of scripture, fury, and release.
Dissolve
A quiet surrender to stillness.
Herceg Novi
A moment held in stillness.
Hourglass
A soft drift towards to final quiet.
Change
Small seeds create verdant lands.
How Do I Tell Her?
A quiet devotion to the woman I love.
I Never Drive In Agra
A vivid rush through colour and chaos.
Long Walls Come to Those Who Wait
A tribute to patience and power.
My Sunshine
A moment that stayed with me.
About This Collection
“These poems were never written to impress. They were written because I needed somewhere to put the things I was carrying.”
This collection began as a way for me to understand myself. Every poem here comes from a real moment, a real fear, a real joy, a real loss, a real conversation, a real memory. None of them were written to impress. None were written to perform. They were written because I needed somewhere to put the things I was carrying.
Some pieces arrived fully formed in a single sitting, poured out without editing. Others came from travel, from family, from grief, from love, from anxiety, from the strange quiet that follows a difficult day. A few came from moments so small they should have disappeared, yet they stayed with me. Writing them helped me make sense of the world, and helped me make sense of myself.
Across the collection you will find scenes of family tenderness, reflections on time, woodland harmony, grief that refuses to behave, travel that overwhelms the senses, and the quiet beauty found in ordinary life. You will also find the people who shaped me: my wife, my daughters, my Dad. Their presence runs through these pages.
If there is a thread that ties everything together, it is the hope that words can hold what we struggle to say out loud. These poems are my attempt to do exactly that.
— R. Stephen
Themes across the collection:
- family and connection
- grief and remembrance
- time and self reflection
- nature as mirror
- hope in a divided world