A Summer Tale | Cyprus Poems

River at dusk, echoes of grief and loss

Swallows still flew carefree

in the August sky — ironic!

Our summer had ended in July.

At the twilight of the day, we meet

in the silent garden of the obscured.

We reach out but we can never touch.

Shadows drift across her eyes,

she whispers to me, but I do not hear her —

I am terrified, will I forget her voice?

Decades in the Nether World.

I breathe life into you and thousands

around the world now know the tale.

Yet I keep your name a secret.

The acacia trees still bloom in springtime;

it was never meant to be our time.

I smile for our days of May

and grieve for the nearing days of winter.

Part of the cycle of poems thirteen silk verses

A few words about the poem…

Cyprus Poems: A Summer Tale of Death, Grief and Loss

“A Summer Tale,” part of the wider cycle Cyprus Poems and structurally aligned with Thirteen Silk Verses, functions as a threshold poem. It does not tell a story, nor does it resolve tension. Instead, it sets the emotional, temporal, and metaphysical ground on which the sequence stands. From the opening stanza, grief, memory, and loss are presented not as events, but as ongoing states. These inner conditions unfold against a natural world that continues without pause or concern.

The image of swallows flying in August is central to this contrast. Their movement is described as carefree and explicitly marked as “ironic.” The birds do not witness loss; they ignore it. Life continues with rhythm and ease, while the speaker’s own season has already ended. The poem does not describe grief directly. Instead, it allows the reader to feel it through this disjunction between personal devastation and external normality.

The line “Our summer had ended in July” is deliberately plain. It avoids lyric flourish or metaphor. Here, summer is not only a season, but a shared time abruptly cut short. The possessive “our” shifts the focus from individual pain to relational loss. At the same time, the pluperfect tense (“had ended”) creates distance. The loss is not unfolding now; it is already complete and beyond repair. Grief enters the poem as something final, not provisional.

In the second stanza, the poem moves into an uncertain metaphysical space described as “the silent garden of the obscured.” This is not a traditional underworld or a consoling afterlife. It is a place of partial presence, where boundaries remain unclear. The meeting between speaker and beloved occurs “at the twilight of the day,” a moment that mirrors the poem’s wider concern with thresholds. Life and death, memory and forgetting, presence and absence all remain unresolved.

Touch and voice appear throughout the poem as failed means of connection. The speaker cannot touch the beloved, reinforcing separation not only through death but through time. More unsettling is the failure of sound. The beloved whispers, yet the speaker cannot hear. This introduces a second loss: the possible loss of memory itself. When the speaker asks whether he will forget her voice, the poem moves beyond elegy. It becomes an inquiry into what remains when even memory begins to erode.

Later, the poem turns briefly toward its own public life. The speaker reflects on having given the beloved a form of life through poetry. Thousands may know her story, yet her name remains withheld. This tension between exposure and protection is deliberate. The beloved is shared, but never fully surrendered. Anonymity does not diminish her presence; it preserves it. The poem draws a clear ethical line between private grief and public art.

In the final stanza, nature returns. Acacia trees bloom, seasons shift, and time moves forward. Yet the poem refuses comfort. Renewal offers no healing. The line “It was never meant to be our time” rejects any redemptive reading of natural cycles. The world continues, but the loss remains. Seasonal change does not restore what has been taken; it only frames the speaker’s movement toward his own finitude.

Within Cyprus Poems, “A Summer Tale” serves as an orienting poem rather than a narrative one. It presents grief as atmosphere, not spectacle. Despair is not dramatized; it is lived. The poem resists consolation and avoids catharsis. It does not argue with death or seek transcendence. Instead, it endures. Memory persists, fully aware of its own fragility, and that awareness becomes the poem’s quiet strength.