Why the Bell Rings
[what’s left when silence starts to sound like surrender]
Hi! I’m Rebecca M. Bell, and I write because silence is a luxury too many have learned to afford.
You’ve found The Bell Rings 🔔— not necessarily a newsletter, but a living signal. A small rebellion disguised as poetry. A gathering place for those who still believe that art is a form of moral infrastructure.
Since June, more than one hundred and sixty new readers have joined this circle, and to every one of you: welcome. You are proof that the algorithm hasn’t yet erased our attention spans or our empathy.
I wrote A Collection of Momentum while the air itself felt electrified— poems that burned like teargas, written to shake the dust from fostered apathy. Then came A Collection of Reverence, quieter but no less radical: a book about remembering how to kneel before the sacred, even while the sirens screamed through screens.
Those two books are out in the world now, but this space—this Substack—is where the next pulse begins. Here, I publish essays, dispatches, and whispered revolutions in verse. I write about politics because it shapes the body. I write about wonder because it saves the soul. I write because someone has to keep record of who we were while it mattered.
If you stay, expect fire and philosophy, satire and sincerity, grief and awe— meticulously braided together. Expect to be reminded that beauty still belongs to us.
The bell rings to wake the living.
I hope you’ll listen. 🔔
Stay tuned, stay human,
—Rebecca M. Bell
📚 Author of A Collection of Momentum & A Collection of Reverence (2025)
P.S.
when the world went dim,
we stayed luminous—
specters of empathy
drifting through the wires,
ringing the bell
for whoever still believes
in the living.
🌐 rmbellwrites.com
🕯️ @rmbellwrites
Filed Under: literary resistance, reintroduction, why we write, & the sound of staying human