Author’s Statement

This poem is sewn from silences – not the absence of sound, but the presence of things we were never taught to say. The rituals done without knowing why. The names we carry but rarely question. The weight passed down in folded prayers, in gestures, in the muscle memory of daughters who were told that quiet was grace.

“Threaded Through the Silence” doesn’t trace culture as something whole, it traces the gaps. The interruptions. The inherited hush that shapes what we do, but not always what we understand. I write into those gaps – with memory, myth, and the kind of silence that isn’t empty, but echoing.

I write in thread – memory, myth, and silence – to weave a voice from the spaces between. The poem deliberately shifts from third to first to second person – mirroring the movement from observing inherited silences, to internalizing them, and finally to confronting the reader with their own.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s reclamation: a search for what endures, what unravels, and what we dare to stitch back in our own name.¹

Threaded Through the Silence | Poem

What silence do you carry in your name?
The thread that pulls without a needle’s sting -
Not worn with pride, but never steeped in shame,
A hush stitched tight beneath a broken wing.

Did someone teach you how to fold your grief
Into a smile – not stitched, just held in place?
To hush the truth behind a family myth,
While stories vanished, fraying into trace?

I’ve seen it – in the way the incense curled,
Then burned the questions with the sandalwood.
In mothers who knew what not to tell the world,
And taught their daughters silence made you good.

This isn’t mine alone. It lives in you –
If you have mouthed a song you didn’t know,
Or spoken prayers in languages worn through,
And wondered which voice you were meant to show.

I carry it still – but not in straight lines,
Some roads are winding, stitched from what unbinds.
We walk between what roots us to the past,
And chart new routes through silences once cast.

So, tell me: when you speak, who speaks with you?
What hush were you handed, mistaken for voice?
What thread still knots itself inside what’s true –
A silence you inherited, not by choice?

We do not cut the thread. We call it true,
And stitch a louder legacy from quiet too.

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¹ Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (New York: Penguin Press, 2019); Agha Shahid Ali, The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992).

This piece was originally published in the United Nations Youth's Global Advocate magazine (Issue 2025: Roots and Routes) and is republished here with the author’s and publisher’s permission.

The original piece can be found here:  UN Youth Magazine