Literature
The Threshold of Mother's Silence
The second part of the Mother Earth Trilogy: the cracks have reached the chest, the body has hardened like old tree bark, and Mother has stopped nursing — silence as a boundary.
Part 2 of 3 · The Mother Earth Trilogy. Previously: Ratapan Ibu · Next: Ibu, di Sisa-Sisa →
The series continues. After Ratapan Ibu — in which Mother Earth still cries out in silence — Tientus Sudarto, a Friend of DIAZ, brings the same figure to a quieter point in his second work, Ambang Sunyi Ibu.
If in the earlier work a fresh wound spread from the face to the neck, this time the cracks have reached the chest — the place that once let life flow. Her body has now hardened and split like old tree bark, overgrown with dry twigs that ensnare rather than support. The hair covering her face is no longer adorned with flowers, but with bare branches; dry leaves fall strand by strand around her. The flower crown that once bloomed golden has withered completely.
Tientus writes of this shift as the moment a mother stops nursing — not by choice, but because the wound has almost touched her very core. It is a limit we have rarely imagined: that even a gift that seems endless can run out.
Here is the poem that accompanies this work:
Ambang Sunyi Ibu (The Threshold of Mother's Silence)
After that lament, mother no longer seeks an ear.
Mother is in silence.Mother begins to stop nursing. She has given for too long,
opening her body as a source of life that was thought never to run dry.
The cracks now reach her chest, where life was once made to flow.
It is not because she chooses to stop, but because the wound has almost touched her core.
The flowers that once bloomed slowly dry, collapse and fall away, replaced by dry twigs that hold the silence.Mother Earth now stands at the threshold of silence as a marker of limits, that not every gift is destined to keep flowing.
When pain is normalized as progress, and exploitation is accepted as ordinary, silence becomes the last language.
If life today feels dry and fragile, perhaps it is because we have forgotten that even Mother has a limit to being hurt again and again.
If Ratapan Ibu was still a question posed outward — “Is this normal?” — then Ambang Sunyi Ibu is its quietest answer: silence. Not a resigned silence, but silence as a boundary — a sign that something long assumed to be limitless turns out to have an end.
Artwork specifications
- Media: Charcoal and coffee stain on A4 natural paper.
- Black: charcoal from the remains of illegally logged wood, South Malang.
- Brown: coffee stain.
The Mother Earth Trilogy
Three works by Tientus Sudarto to be read in order, from lament, to silence, to remnants:
- Ratapan Ibu — a wound that still seeks an ear
- Ambang Sunyi Ibu — a wound that chooses silence (this part)
- Ibu, di Sisa-Sisa — a wound with almost nothing left to be heard at all
Viva DIAZ
