In Our Little Garden | Cyprus Poems

Love among the flowers

Lies, lies, lies.

My Morning Star still lights the dawn.

The world speaks lies.

Only the gypsy knows the truth.

We carved our sunrise song

on the steps of the tiny chapel.

You touch me, I tremble.

First and last, it’s always you

among the flowers that bloom in May.

Our scented little garden

breathes carnations and jasmine

and when night falls,

we lie skin on skin and say welcome

to our child, unborn.

On Saturday nights,

we go to the village cinema

with a swarm of strapping sons

and a daughter with black curls,

beautiful like her mother.

I came past your house today.

It smelled of lavender and basil,

the door was bolted shut

with a pitch-black ribbon

tied to your bedroom window.

A few words about the poem…

In Our Little Garden: Grief, Loss, and the Denial of Death  - Cyprus Poems

“In Our Little Garden,” a poem in the series Thirteen Silk Verses and within the broader cycle Cyprus Poems, occupies a carefully delimited space. It is not representative of the series as a whole, nor does it attempt to summarise its concerns. Instead, it narrows the field of vision, focusing on a single imagined domestic world in order to explore how love and death coexist within memory. In this sense, the series Thirteen Silk Verses provides the landscape and horizon, while “In Our Little Garden” remains firmly grounded in a specific, intimate enclosure.

The poem is defined by its economy and its refusal of overt explanation. Here, the garden functions not as symbol in the abstract but as a lived space: cultivated, shared, and temporal. It is a place where the future is imagined—children welcomed before they are born—and where that imagined continuity is later confronted by irreversible loss. The poem does not elevate the garden into metaphor; it allows it to remain ordinary, and thereby capable of holding grief.

Unlike other poems in Cyprus Poems, which may draw more explicitly on geography, history, or communal memory, “In Our Little Garden” is inward-looking. Cyprus is present indirectly, through custom and scent, through the village cinema and the funerary use of lavender and basil. These elements are not explanatory markers of place; they operate quietly, assuming cultural knowledge rather than displaying it. The poem’s restraint ensures that Cyprus remains a lived background rather than a theme.

Love “In Our Little Garden” is rendered without declaration. It appears in proximity, touch, and shared routines. The poem resists the language of devotion or transcendence, presenting love instead as something habitual and bodily, embedded in daily life. This understated approach is essential to the poem’s coming-of-age dimension. The transition it records is not from youth to adulthood in any conventional sense, but from imagined plenitude to the knowledge of finitude. Love does not prevent death; it simply precedes it.

Death itself is introduced obliquely and late. The poem does not narrate an event but registers its consequences: a house passed in daylight, a bolted door, a black ribbon tied to a bedroom window. The specificity of the bedroom matters. It localises grief, returning it to youth, privacy, and interrupted intimacy. This narrowing of focus is deliberate. Where Cyprus Poems as a cycle may open outward, “In Our Little Garden” closes in.

As part of the series Thirteen Silk Verses, the poem participates in a larger meditation on fragility and endurance, but it does so without claiming authority beyond its own bounds. It does not speak for Cyprus, nor does it attempt to universalise its loss. Instead, it offers a single, carefully held instance of remembrance. The world may “speak lies,” but the poem does not argue with the world; it quietly preserves what the world cannot keep.

In this way, “In Our Little Garden” exemplifies how a poem can remain small in scale while carrying serious emotional weight. Within the architecture of Cyprus Poems, it stands not as a thematic centre but as a private room—entered briefly, left intact, and remembered for its silence as much as for its words.