When the Earth Sang of Us: Listening to the Earth's Quiet Music

An author's introduction to When the Earth Sang of Us: A Meditation on Love, Life and Nature

Some books begin with an idea; others begin with listening.

When the Earth Sang of Us belongs to the second kind.

Many of these poems grew from watching rain gather on leaves, sitting beneath old trees, remembering voices that time has carried away, travelling through unfamiliar landscapes, or simply noticing how ordinary moments can contain extraordinary tenderness. Others emerged from less peaceful places: loneliness, disillusionment, the struggle to recover from emotional wounds, and the unease of watching humanity turn against itself.

This collection became my attempt to hold these experiences together without pretending they always lead to easy answers.

It is certainly a book about love. But it is equally about ageing without bitterness, remembering without becoming trapped by memory, seeking belonging in the natural world, questioning the society we have built, and believing that kindness survives even when the world offers reasons to doubt it.

The poems do not always agree with one another. Some celebrate love as an enduring force; others acknowledge how profoundly it can hurt. Some find peace in silence, while others enter the darkness and refuse to soften what they encounter. Perhaps this is only natural. Human beings are rarely consistent in their feelings, and poetry need not be either.

If there is one thread that ties these poems together, it is this: the earth has always been speaking. The question is whether we still know how to listen.

Where nature becomes a companion

Nature is not merely a backdrop in these poems. It remembers us as much as we remember it.

In "December's Quiet Song", the passing of another year becomes an occasion to consider ageing, unfinished ambitions and the possibility of contentment. The poem begins with the sound of trees becoming music:

The maracas of leafy trees
whisper rhythms to the wind,
a quiet song of December.

The image grew from the pleasure of watching leaves move in the wind, but the poem soon turns towards the familiar human accounting of time. There are things accomplished, and things left undone; years accumulate, and time continues its relentless passage.

Yet the poem arrives at a gentler understanding:

What is there to grieve,
when old feels like this
and life hums softly
in the company of trees?

I wanted to write against the fear that often surrounds ageing. There is sadness in passing time, but there can also be peace. The garden, with its roots and petals and its bench painted green with memories, offers a form of companionship that does not demand explanations or achievements.

"A Walk Through the Glade" extends this sense of belonging:

My spirit blends with leaf and breeze,
One with all creation.

Here, the natural world offers more than beauty. It allows the speaker to experience a temporary freedom from the divisions between self and surroundings. In "Aimless Wanderer", that same impulse becomes a desire to travel without a fixed destination, to follow curiosity rather than an itinerary.

But nature in this collection is not always gentle. "Wild Is the Night" enters a far more unsettling landscape:

Wild is the night
a lover with teeth,
a song without melody,

The poem imagines darkness as a force that devours the tame and summons the reckless. Its wind prowls, its river carries the ghosts of forgotten cities, and its moon becomes a watchful hunter. The familiar landscape of refuge has become an untamed presence, beautiful but dangerous.

I find this contrast important. Nature is not obliged to comfort us. It can soothe, overwhelm, frighten and humble us. Its power lies partly in its refusal to exist merely for our convenience.

Love and the fear of loving again

Love occupies a central place in the collection, but it does not speak with a single voice.

In "Love Without Measure", affection reaches beyond the limitations of language:

I love you beyond the borders of language,
where words stumble,
faltering in the shadow of feeling.

The poem turns towards the ocean, the stars and the open horizon to express a tenderness that ordinary declarations cannot adequately contain. Its emotional centre is a quiet acceptance of another person's existence:

Only the quiet knowing
that you are,
and that is enough.

In "What Love Means", love appears as a force that can unite two people without requiring constant proof of its depth:

True love grows deeper, never proves too much.

These poems approach love as a source of continuity, wonder and emotional fulfilment. But the collection also recognises the vulnerability that accompanies such openness.

In "Broken", the speaker has reached an entirely different conclusion:

I'm too broken
to ever fall in love again.

The voice is guarded, exhausted by the prospect of further hurt. It describes a self that has retreated into solitude, regarding isolation as a form of protection from the possibility of renewed disappointment.

The poem's starkest admission is:

I learned the hard way:
nothing ever lasts.
Not joy,
not promises,
not even love.

Placed beside "Love Without Measure", this is not simply a contradiction to be resolved. It is another truth about the human heart. The capacity to love deeply does not make us immune to hurt, and the desire to protect ourselves can become as powerful as the desire to connect.

I wanted the collection to make room for both experiences: the belief that love can transcend language and the fear that it may leave us unable to trust again. Between them lies the difficult territory of being human, where hope and self-preservation often struggle for space.

Loneliness, resilience and the work of surviving

The emotional darkness of "Broken" finds a deeper counterpart in "A Musing of Loneliness". Here, isolation becomes almost a physical landscape, a place into which the speaker feels pulled against their will:

loneliness devours my soul
in cold silence,
a poison spreading through my being.

The poem offers no easy consolation. Its speaker feels cut off from the comforting touch of love, unheard in longing and imprisoned within a widening sense of despair.

Such poems matter because loneliness is not always the peaceful solitude celebrated in nature writing. Sometimes it is an involuntary separation from the world, made more painful by the absence of someone who might understand.

Yet the collection also explores the possibility of emerging from emotional upheaval with a different kind of strength.

"Emotional Strength" declares:

Not numb,
but tempered.
Not cold,
but carved in calm.

These lines distinguish resilience from the suppression of feeling. To survive difficult experiences is not necessarily to become indifferent. It may mean learning to endure what cannot be controlled without allowing it to consume one's entire identity.

The poem concludes with an understanding of strength that is quiet rather than theatrical:

My strength is silence
in the eye of chaos
not in denial,
but in quiet survival.

Read together, "A Musing of Loneliness", "Broken" and "Emotional Strength" trace different positions on an emotional landscape: the experience of being overwhelmed, the impulse to withdraw, and the gradual discovery of an inner steadiness. They do not promise that every wound will heal neatly. They acknowledge that survival itself can be an achievement.

The longing for a home we cannot quite name

Not every kind of loneliness can be cured by companionship or a change of surroundings. Some forms of longing are harder to identify because they concern a sense of belonging that may never have had a definite place.

In "Hiraeth", a Welsh word associated with longing for a home that is absent, lost or perhaps never fully possessed, the speaker searches for this elusive feeling through nature, stories and the imagination.

The poem offers a particularly revealing distinction:

My hiraeth is not a place,
but a feeling stitched into beauty,
a home I seek
in every wave, word, and wind.

I am drawn to this idea of belonging as an inward condition rather than a geographical destination. We may travel extensively, return to familiar places, or surround ourselves with people and possessions, yet continue to feel that something remains beyond our reach.

Nature becomes a language through which this longing can be recognised, if not entirely explained. Mountains, oceans, moonlight and the pages of old stories offer glimpses of a home that exists as much in the imagination as in the physical world.

This is one reason travel and wandering recur throughout the collection. The journey is not always about arriving somewhere new. Sometimes it is an attempt to understand what we have been searching for all along.

The world we are forgetting

Some of these poems are quieter acts of contemplation. Others are responses to what troubles me about contemporary life.

"Hollow Existence" questions the growing tendency to substitute digital engagement for direct experience:

Oh! What hollow lives we lead,
Eyes locked on glowing screens
Like robots in automation,
We shun each human scene.

The concern is not technology alone. It is what may disappear when screens occupy the attention once given to gardens, conversations, rivers and the changing sky. The poem asks whether a world of constant connection can paradoxically leave us disconnected from the people and places around us.

"Religious Hysteria: A Benefit for the Rulers" turns towards a more disturbing form of disconnection: the abandonment of human compassion in the name of belief and power.

After depicting the destruction inflicted upon ordinary people, the poem asks:

What holy cause justifies the ruin?
What God thrives in the ruins?

These questions arise from a refusal to accept that faith can excuse cruelty or that the suffering of innocent people is an acceptable price for political or religious dominance.

The same concern for human dignity informs "When Humanity Sleeps", which begins with the devastation wrought by war and terrorism before imagining a world beyond inherited divisions:

Let not our bloodlines
draw battlelines.

The poem's vision is aspirational, but its urgency comes from the violence it confronts. It asks us to imagine a society in which shared humanity matters more than the boundaries that separate communities.

The movement from nature poems to poems of social conscience is deliberate. To cherish the world is also to recognise what threatens it. The beauty of the earth cannot be separated entirely from our responsibility towards one another and towards the lives with which we share it.

July, memory and the geography of belonging

Among the poems closest to my heart is "July's Daughter".

I was born during the monsoon, and rain has always felt like more than weather. It carries the scent of wet earth, the memory of childhood, the sound of water moving through familiar streets, and the cultural inheritance of Bengali music and literature.

The poem begins:

I was born into the weeping skies of July in this part of the world
where the monsoon speaks in a language only the soul understands.

The monsoon nourishes the fields and awakens the earth, but it also brings flooded streets and stalled dreams. The poem holds these experiences together, refusing to reduce the season to either celebration or hardship.

Its concluding declaration is personal:

I am July's daughter
of its storms and softness.

That pairing captures something I wanted to express about resilience. We are shaped not only by the pleasures we remember, but also by the difficulties through which we learn to live. Tenderness and endurance need not be opposites.

Finding wonder before it disappears

There is another side to the collection, one that asks what happens when we retain the capacity to be astonished.

"Where Wonder Lingers" looks towards snow, rainbows, children's laughter and the small experiences that can restore our sense of possibility. A child's imagination transforms an ordinary cardboard box into a castle; a stick becomes a sword; the familiar world opens into new dimensions.

The poem's invitation is simple:

Where wonder lingers,
let us not pass too quickly.

It is a reminder that wonder does not belong exclusively to childhood. Adults may become more practised at explanation, but that does not mean the world has exhausted its capacity to surprise us.

This thought connects with "How My First Poem Was Born", a haiku that remembers the beginning of a creative impulse:

the first drops of rain
carried music to my ears
I felt a spark light

The rain becomes the beginning of a poem, and the poem becomes the beginning of a book. What matters is the moment when an ordinary experience crosses some invisible threshold and becomes something worth preserving in words.

Time, mortality and the choice to live

The passage of time returns throughout the collection, sometimes as a source of tranquillity, sometimes as a warning.

In "Inheritance", a grandfather offers to teach his granddaughter how to mend a fishing net. She refuses, unable to recognise the value of what he wants to pass on. Years later, she finds herself wishing she had listened.

The poem closes with a reflection on the knowledge we often acquire too late:

Some things are not for the moment
but meant for when the moment has gone.

The net becomes a symbol of inherited wisdom, of the fragile connections between generations, and of the cost of neglecting what we do not yet understand.

"Ephemeral Time" approaches mortality more directly. It considers the relentless movement of time and the impossibility of recovering what has passed, before turning towards the choices that remain available to us:

Let us seize each fleeting breath,
chase the light of unfulfilled dreams,
speak the words we've left unsaid,
embrace, forgive, become.

There is a difference between accepting that life is finite and surrendering to that knowledge. The poem urges us towards the former, asking us to live more consciously rather than allowing regret to become the defining feature of our later years.

In this sense, the collection's reflections on ageing are not simply about looking backwards. They are also about recognising what remains possible.

The small things that keep the world singing

After the more sombre poems, "The World Still Sings" returns to the ordinary sources of happiness that can be overlooked in the pursuit of something grander.

Its world is made of sparrows, children's laughter, turning pages, a kettle singing, a table being set and a kindly word offered without ceremony.

The poem reminds us:

Meaning isn't far or grand
It rests within your open hand,

This is not a denial of suffering. The collection has already acknowledged loneliness, broken trust, violence and the passage of time. Rather, it is a recognition that pain does not cancel the possibility of joy, just as beauty does not erase suffering.

The world can be difficult and still possess moments of extraordinary grace. We can be disappointed in humanity and still encounter generosity. We can feel the weight of time and still find reasons to begin again.

The poem ends with an affirmation that gathers these ideas into a single image:

The world still sings. It sings for you.

For me, this is one of the collection's most important counterpoints to its darker poems. It does not insist that everything is well. It asks us not to become so absorbed in what is broken that we lose the ability to hear what remains alive.

Why I hope readers will carry these poems with them

When the Earth Sang of Us moves between serenity and unease, affection and disappointment, spiritual longing and social criticism. Its poems do not offer one definitive account of life. They approach it from different directions, allowing contradictions to remain where a single answer would feel inadequate.

Some readers may find themselves drawn to the natural landscapes, others to the poems about love, loneliness, ageing or the inheritance passed between generations. Still others may respond to the questions about technology, violence and humanity's relationship with the world it inhabits.

I hope the collection offers each reader a point of recognition.

Perhaps it will be the sound of leaves moving in the wind, or the smell of July rain. Perhaps it will be a grandfather's unfinished lesson, the reluctance to trust after heartbreak, or the discovery that resilience need not mean becoming hard. Perhaps it will be the awareness that we can love the world deeply while remaining troubled by what we see happening within it.

I do not expect readers to remember every poem. I hope they remember a feeling, a question, or an image that returns to them when they least expect it.

If someone closes this book and looks a little longer at a tree outside their window, calls a person they have been meaning to call, walks without checking their phone, or listens to the rain with renewed attention, then these poems will have travelled beyond the pages on which they were written.

The earth has always been singing. There are days when its song is gentle, days when it is wild, and days when the noise of our own making threatens to drown it out.

These poems are my attempt to hear a few notes of that endless song, and to remember that we are not merely observers of the world around us. We are part of it, shaped by its beauty, vulnerable to its changes, responsible for its future, and bound to one another by the brief and complicated gift of being alive.

***

About the Author

Susmita Mukherjee is an Indian author and former teacher at Army Public School, based in Kolkata, India. Her writing explores the intersections of labour, resilience, displacement, and human tenderness, examining the quiet complexities of relationships and the experiences that shape our lives. A trained Indian classical vocalist with a background in IT education and hospitality, she brings precision, sensitivity, and empathy to her work.

Her stories and poems have appeared in Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Muse India, Intrepidus Ink, Flash Fiction Magazine, Fractured Lit Magazine, Sky Island Journal, Nanum Magazine, BULL Lit Mag, Kitaab, Setu, Epistemic Literary Magazine, Gulmohur Quarterly, Fictive Dream, Literally Stories, Literary Yard, Shabdodweep Web Magazine, and other literary journals. Her work has received recognition in several competitions, including second place in the Flash Fiction Magazine contest, the Inkspot Story Competition 2025–26, and the 3 Minute Arts Story Writing Competition 2025–26.

Her debut poetry collection, When the Earth Sang of Us: A Meditation on Love, Life and Nature, reflects on love, the natural world, memory, loneliness, belonging, and the fragile connections between human beings and the world they inhabit. The collection invites readers to pause, observe, and rediscover the extraordinary within ordinary moments.

The book is available internationally in print and digital editions through selected booksellers, including Amazon, Flipkart, Booktopia, the MIT Press Bookstore, Lowell Books, AbeBooks, Adlibris, BookLeaf Publications, and Barnes & Noble.

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Susmita continues to write fiction and poetry shaped by an enduring interest in people, their untold stories, and the moments of beauty and difficulty that make up a life.

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