Cyclamen

Cyclamen blooms in the quiet of winter, its swept-back petals like cupped hands protecting something precious. In this delicate Victorian meditation, Murray transforms a single flower into an invocation of transience and tenderness. The poem moves through the garden's sleeping season, finding in the cyclamen's quiet beauty a reflection of something larger: the way fragile things persist, the ache of things too lovely to last. Murray's verse carries that distinctly Victorian fusion of pastoral escape and melancholy awareness, where nature's cycles become mirrors for human feeling. Written by an American-born poet who made his home in the grey seaside light of St Andrews, this piece carries the particular loneliness of exile rendered beautiful. The cyclamen becomes both observation and obsession, a flower that asks to be looked at before it fades. For readers who linger on single stanzas, who find in brief poems entire emotional landscapes, Cyclamen offers a moment of crystalline stillness.