BETWEEN TWILIGHT, THE COSMOS, AND A SILENCE THAT NEVER ENDS: A NOTE FOR "SILUET, SENJA, DAN JINGGA" 2019 POETRY BOOK BY RIRI SATRIA

by: Selena Fortuna Lie

This time, I choose to write this reflection a little differently, in a descriptive-reflective tone, tracing the familiar rhythm of how Riri Satria writes his poems, unhurried, unforced, not rushing toward conclusions, but wandering gently through inner landscapes, allowing words to become contemplation rather than mere explanation.

There is something that slowly reveals itself when reading "Siluet, Senja, dan Jingga" (2019). It does not arrive like a crashing wave, but like the quiet spread of twilight, subtle, almost unnoticed, until suddenly the sky has changed its color, and something within us has shifted along with it.

The poems feel like traces of a long journey, not merely across cities or countries, but across the self. There are passages through Paris, Ubud, and the vast sky tens of thousands of feet above the earth, yet all of these seem to serve only as backdrops to a more intimate voyage. one that moves inward, into a boundless inner space. In that space, words are no longer just words, they become a near-desperate attempt to grasp something that constantly slips away.

What lingers most is a particular kind of solitude. Not an empty one, but a saturated silence filled with thought, questions, and a restless awareness. It is the solitude of someone who has thought too far, too deeply, until the world no longer appears fully explainable. Even love, in many of these poems, does not come as a simple refuge. It becomes another mystery, another dimension that resists clarity.

The figure of the woman appears not merely as a beloved, but as a mirror, a symbol, perhaps even a gateway to something larger than the intimacy between two individuals.

What makes this collection distinct is how it refuses to abandon the rational world. Physics, mathematics, and technological language, terms that usually belong to laboratories or lecture halls, enter the poems without feeling alien. In many hands, such elements might feel rigid or imposed.

Here, they read as an honest admission: that a mind trained in logic cannot simply silence itself in the presence of feeling. Poetry becomes a meeting ground, where equations stand beside longing, where the language of the cosmos intertwines with personal unrest.

At this point, it becomes difficult not to think of the poet himself. There is a strong sense that these poems are not born from someone who has always lived entirely within literature. They feel like the work of someone who once stood far from it, perhaps more at home with systems, structures, and logic, and who then returned to poetry carrying the full weight of that experience.

His background in computer science, academia, and the world of business and technology does not disappear, it transforms, becoming part of the poetic language itself.

There is, within that transformation, a quiet longing. A longing to reconcile two worlds often seen as incompatible, the measured, structured world of reason, and the fluid, elusive world of feeling.

Perhaps that is why many of these poems feel like unfinished conversations, dialogues between reason and emotion, certainty and doubt, the desire to understand and the realization that not everything can be understood.

Twilight and its orange glow recur throughout the collection, not merely as aesthetic choices, but as symbols of in-betweenness. Neither fully light nor fully dark, neither entirely certain nor entirely lost. There is beauty in that space, but also a quiet ache, because twilight always carries the sense of something ending, even when we are not ready to let it go.

I imagine that writing these poems is not simply a creative act, but a necessity. A way of breathing amid the density of thought. A way of remaining whole when logic alone is no longer sufficient to make sense of the world. Perhaps also a way of accepting that not all questions need answers, that not all unrest must be resolved.

In some moments, there is a palpable fatigue. An honest one. When poetry falls silent, when words seem to disappear, when even language can no longer contain what longs to be expressed.

Yet it is precisely in these moments that the collection feels most human. It does not force beauty. It does not always strive for perfection. It allows cracks, hesitation, and even failure to appear. And strangely, it is in those fractures that it becomes more intimate.

In the end, reading "Siluet, Senja, dan Jingga" (2019) feels like sitting alone by the sea at dusk. Nothing dramatic unfolds on the surface, only waves, wind, and the gradual shift of colors across the sky. Yet within, so much is in motion. Memories, questions, regrets, and hopes drift in and out, impossible to fully hold.

And when the twilight finally fades, what remains is not an answer, but a quiet awareness that we have traveled somewher though we cannot quite say where. Perhaps that was never the point.

Perhaps, like the poems themselves, what matters is not arrival, but the act of continuing to ask, to seek, and to quietly accept that some parts of life will always remain a mystery, beautiful, and at times, painfully so.

Warm regads
Selena F. Lie