A tender collection of illustrated poems and quiet reflections
WhisperedThistle
Poems for the quiet hours, when nothing is asking anything of you.
Everything soft in melearned to be softbehind something sharp.
About the author
Writes by the window. Mostly at night.
Mira Solene
Mira grew up coastal,Where the wind did the talking,She learned to keep still,And to listen while walking.
She trained as a botanist,Named every weed,Found the ones nobody wantedWere the ones gone to seed.
A decade in the herbarium,Pressing what had died,She kept a second notebookThat she never let outside.
Then a winter ran long,And a friend didn’t stay,And the second notebook filledWith the things she couldn’t say.
She drew what she couldn’t finish,In ink, in the margin,A thistle beside every lineShe was frightened of starting.
Nine years of small hours,No audience, no plan,Ninety-four poems,And the drawings where they began.
Mira wants you to know,That the guarded ones grow,That the thing with the thornsIs the first to let go.
Whispered Thistle gathers ninety-four poems and forty-one ink drawings made across nine winters, most of them at a kitchen table between two and four in the morning. They are not instructions and they are not answers. They are the small, unspectacular noticings of someone learning that the parts of her she had armoured were never the parts that needed protecting — set down here in the hope that you may one day forget the words entirely, and keep only the way they made the room feel.
The book
WhisperedThistle
- Print length
- 168 pages
- Illustrations
- 41 ink drawings
- Publication date
- 12 March 2026
- Edition
- First edition
- Format
- Hardcover and eBook
- Author
- Mira Solene
In a jar of thistledown left on a windowsill, I found out what I had been holding, and for how long.
In the fourth winter, when the house stayed quiet for a month, I found company in the things that grow without asking.
In the drawings I never meant to keep, I found the poem was already there, waiting to be given words.
Have you ever kept something safe so long you forgot it was still alive?
Have you noticed the light change, and let yourself stop for it?
Have you ever loved a thing that could not be held gently?
Have you let one small gladness be enough for a whole day?
Have you said the true thing quietly, to no one, and meant it anyway?
Have you ever let go of something and felt the relief arrive before the grief?
These poems are the answers arriving slowly, in one person’s handwriting, at a kitchen table, in the dark.
There is more that quiets us than divides us. Every thistle in this book was drawn from life, and every poem is somebody’s ordinary evening.
Nothing here is in a hurry. Read one, close the book, and let it follow you around for a week.
Author’s note
Most of these arrived at the hour when the house had gone quiet and there was no one left to be impressive for.
I am not offering you a way through anything. I only found that saying the small true thing out loud, even to an empty room, made the room warmer.
If one of these meets you somewhere you weren’t expecting, that is the whole of it.
— Mira Solene