2016

Too early to think of spring,

we can at least hope for crisp snow days,

for skies as dense and soft as cotton wool.

The old year sighs with relief,

puts up its feet: on the cusp of a hill

the sunlight shades into promises

and the silhouettes sharpen

across the overlooked, the too easily forgotten.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Весела Коледа/Merry Christmas

Wishing everyone a merry Christmas and happy New Year from Colourful Star

We're now into the second year of our collaboration, publishing more than 50 paintings and poems since this time last year. In fact, 2015 has seen us making our 100th post and you can see all the paintings in one go on our Colourful Star 100 page. We're also delighted to have had our Colourful Star collaborations published elsewhere too - by Ink Sweat & Tears magazine and by the international poetry site Iris News - and to have people visiting the project, not just from Bulgaria and the UK, but from across Europe, the USA, India and China too.

We're already making plans for next year when there will be new projects, new developments, and we'll also keep publishing new collaborations every Friday.

In the meantime have a very happy and - of course - colourful Christmas!

Marina, Vasilena and Tom xx

Среща в превод/Meeting in translation

За Васил Гандев

A book like a shaken hand

by shelves brimming with titles

which, for the moment, reside

beyond the cusp of my Cyrillic.

Let me do what I can to pull

some equivalent details into light:

how we are together in this flat,

your words and my presence

like something accidental –

or out on the balcony where a splay

of firework comes to seem like fate.

I can hear you, like a whisper

of cicadas, like a streetlamp’s hum,

and even in this noise I’ll find you.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

На върха/On the summit

На върха

Всички те бяха отбор алпинисти.

От строга комисия бяха подбрани

Те бяха отбор алтруисти,

Върха да превземат призвани.

Преди да потеглят пиха наздравица.

Имаше още прегръдки и речи.

И всеки нарами тежката раница,

Че нямаше шерпи - водачи.

При първия зъбер отпаднаха три

Нагоре отпаднаха още и други.

Достигнаха последния лагер малцина,

А за финалния преход нямаха сили

Но един от тях стисна зъби

И до края да стигне успя.

Там гордо своя вимпел заби

и своята песен запя.

Да си на върха беше страхотно.

Там можеш да пипнеш с ръка небосклона

Но на върха е много самотно

Че останаха другите нейде по склона.

On the summit

They were all team climbers.

Chosen by a strict committee,

they were all team climbers,

called up to conquer the summit.

Before setting out, they drank their health.

There were even embraces and speeches

and they all shouldered heavy rucksacks

without sherpas or guides.

On the first crag three dropped out;

further up, others dropped out too.

Only a few reached the last camp,

but they didn’t have strength for the final climb

One, though, gritted his teeth

and succeeded in reaching the top.

There he proudly drove in his pennant

and sang his song.

To be at the summit was great.

There you can touch the sky with your hands

but the summit is very lonely

when the others remain on the slopes.

This week's post brings together one of Marina's paintings with another poem written by her grandfather, the poet Васил Панайотов Гандев.

Image: Marina Shiderova; translation: Tom Phillips

Капката/The droplet

Тя капна на крайпътното дърво.

И от връхното листо

Надолу бавно запълзя

Към мечтаната земя.

Но, да стигне и до ствола не успя,

Че по пътя я изпиха жадните листа

Тя - мъничката капка от дъжда

Гдето вечерта валя.

It fell on a tree at the roadside

and from the highest leaf

slowly crept down

towards the dreaming earth.

But it didn’t succeed in reaching the trunk.

On the way the thirsty leaves drank it­ –

this tiny droplet of rain

while the evening poured.

This week's post brings together one of Marina's paintings with a poem written by her grandfather, the poet Васил Панайотов Гандев.

Image: Marina Shiderova; translation: Tom Phillips

Изчакване/Waiting

It will or won’t happen

to us. The sky folds

into bleached distances.

Cloud cover anticipates all.

Keep it simple. Trees make

hieroglyphs and here,

in this vast space

we’d like to call our own,

the trying vocabulary

dissipates. That’s enough.

Love occurs. I’m not

at a loss any more.

In the interim, I’m waiting

for you to come home.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Общ език/Common language

And because beginnings are precious,

I’m back again. It’s not so far

and all the imaginary occasions

play out across landscapes,

still lifes, portraits I seem

to know. Nothing precise –

but in these brush-strokes words,

reminders of so much

I’ve yet to know.

In the kitchen that day,

we anticipated

precarious coincidence –

faces, bicycles, hills,

meetings in the park –

and then, as if intent

on becoming a prediction,

these peppers that hang

behind us, their solidity,

the first painting of yours I saw.

This is our 100th post on Colourful Star since we launched the project in January 2014. Since then we've been posting our collaborations every Friday and at other times to mark special dates or anniversaries. This post also features on the international poetry website Iris News where we will also be publishing selections from Colourful Star in the future. You can find it here with a translation into Italian by Chiara De Luca. Many thanks to everyone who's visited any of our 100 posts so far and we hope you'll return to see how the project continues to develop. Marina, Vasilena & Tom

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Хризантеми/Chrysanthemums

Autumn’s late. In the garden,

you're pointing out black-eyed Susans –

we’ve been here before.

Flowers breathe. The old man,

my father, pruned chrysanthemums,

stuck them in a bucket.

At the end of our drive,

commuters passed, looked twice,

left 50p for a bunch.

The ash trees have gone

(I’ve seen that now online).

Where we lived

between the stern

coordinates of ornamental firs

there’s off-road parking.

Against the wall

of our neighbour’s garden,

the black-eyed Susans flare.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Кожа/Skin

Skin bears a geography of time.

It softens and furrows.
I’d not realised, of course:

I hadn't been looking.

Around the eyes first,

then the cheeks,

the upper lip –

a contour map,

a bloom of notches.

And then there,

in the hospital

recovery room,

that unutterably

untouched face,

new skin,

another geography

waiting to happen.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Полет/Flight

Days when the sky

was all scudding cloud

and space –

the rate of climb

of those pioneers

like Mum’s dad,

flying flimsy string

and canvas contraptions –

were there again

when you stretched

full length on the hill,

lay back and thought

of eglantine –

was that the name?

– and thick masks

of colour back home,

the profligate spill

of climbing plants,

reaching for the sky

and above you

the space

of scudding clouds.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Нов семестър/A new term

Somewhere up behind the pub

beside the roundabout, the road

dithers between cycle paths

and rattling cattle grids.

In the pre-dawn’s early light,

I’m hashing together lecture notes

and thoughts I might need to have

under transitional cloud cover

until here, with stumped old trees,

I should be at a loss. Not so –

I’m on this particular corner

of the road and over there,

like some well-placed opposite,

this reminder, pollarded from last year.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Между народите/Between nations

Endlessly, the trees behave.

Each branch and twig

might draw the line between

crisp breath and the mist.

Guards stand and stamp

at this point where worlds

collapse into a border.

Beneath ghosting

frontier architecture,

passports are handed over.

We each have our case,

a claim to an identity,

which someone somewhere

in ministry or embassy

will accept, will condone.

Outside the windows

of this sweaty minibus,

a forest occurs, declining

into atmospheric effects,

a foggy weekday morning –

and us, we can’t see the wood

for the proverbial trees.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Входът/Gateway

 Between whatever else happens,

we might be straying across

what’s marked out – the given

delineation of boundaries.

Up in the woods there,

where trackways are signed

and somehow we’re brought out

to a picnic area’s designated space,

we’re talking too of dens

and interlaced branches,

traces of those who’ve been

and gone before – and, of course,

those other distant woods.

Through the trees,

some light effect suggests

a geography of displacement.

Mushrooms grow out

of punk timber like antennae

and we’re coming down

through leaf matter, jutting stones

to the river where, without

so much as a thought,

the path becomes

a path that’s leading home.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Лисица/Fox

The garish light blaze

is the garage across the road

about to close. Working late,

I’m half-lost in old thoughts,

memory's oddments and that –

that brief whisk of a tail

against my legs and I'm up to the door

and going in through the hall

to a back bedroom from where

I can see fox cubs playing possum

in an abandoned bath.

They do their best to look

photogenic, sport
dunned orange, 

hiding and seeking.
And we’d be in

our kitchen watching.

It’s not snowed,

it's not a thought.

but, there,

across the grass

comes the parent-fox.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Минаващ към есента/Passing to autumn

First light of it in today’s sharpening clarity

along a tilled ridge and hopes getting rarer

for that Indian summer. Renewed migrations

shatter the estuary’s surface tension, rising

through the blaze between dunes and cloud.

Trembling reddening leaves, breeze

plays out its delicate variations, brings

itself to bear on the season’s new species:

a foolhardy abundance in ripening gardens

where pruned trees’ amputations ooze sap.

It is no loss to be here, on the threshold

of a mottled wood, marram’s limit,

deciphering fungal growth’s lace patterns

or spider webs’ promises of future frost.

Time doesn’t stop, but only for a second

first light of it holds a sharpening clarity.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Остров/An Island

Back down through seaside streets,

we’re amongst juddering perspectives

that throw us off the obvious map

of grid systems and Central Place Theory.

Life doesn’t happen so neatly.

Wind whirls itself into patterns

evading logical explanation:

as usual, everything’s up in the air.

Those who came and went before us

have staked their claim in pot plants

and architecture. In the sky

our freedom shrieks like a bird.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Люляци/Lilacs

In the shade of the mountains,

a glass of rakiya, just off the cusp

of the main road heading up

towards tourist attractions.

He was sure about his plants.

We were growing hazy

amongst herbs and ferns,

but he could still steer his way

through greenery labels

and the overhanging branches.

The former primary school teacher

poured what he’d distilled

and there was no question:

the lilacs bloomed and we drank.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Начини през гората/Ways through the forest

За Сара/For Sarra

More than anything, a retinal memory

of untailored woodland beside the train.

1989. September. Two months before

dissident sledgehammers undivided Europe.

Distracted by an Indian summer’s drought,

we took photos of dried-up riverbeds

on the tributary between Chinon and Saumur.

Not long married but with commitments made,

this was to be our new and adult world.

1989. September. And those crackling shots

weren't fired in anger, as it turned out,

but by a business party hunting duck

from dinghies moored along the other bank:

they looked to be set on taking the lot.

1989. September. We were on the move,

keeping to hostels and campsites on the Loire.

Without a map, we knew where we’d been:

municipal places, neighbourhood stores,

those unlikely, welcoming foyers.

Paths splayed out from the edge of the forest

into the untailored woodland beside the train.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

За сестри и музи/For sisters and muses

In this thickness of forest,

I might have been half done by:

you know the kind of thing –

out of breath or off the map,

midway through life

and imagining the unimaginable.

Only that was what it was,

just there, a word or two,

a phrase that spiralled out

and up and between and told

of endlessness, a silence,

the endless possibilities.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Мяста в вселената/A place in the universe

The spark of a thought is an arc

out into slingshot space,

gravitational accelerants,

spectacular as stars

whose evanescence

lit fixities for cartographers,

though nothing’s solid

but we think it so.

Relatively speaking,

we turn out to be no more

nor less than this

quintessence,

each one of us passing through

states of wave-particles,

unpatented, subject to –

and of – a vast

unmappable terrain

where thought projects,

no longer just bending minds,

but bending space and time.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Пак друг чайник/Again another kettle

At some point a coincidence, a joining of dots:

a red sheen as one of the specifics,

a kettle with apples and all that suggests.

In the mountains I was lost

amongst landscapes that reared and bucked

without pretence (though easily seen that way).

And then brought home

to lights that flashed beyond these blocks.

Promises of my return, newly familiar scene

at this distance from where

with some hope I might belong.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Листак/Foliage

 

A mystery of woodland, do you remember?

That planned, adopted chaos of underbrush

on the route leading up to Mentmore Towers?

They came out from Luton in their Ford Cortinas,

parked on concreted turn-offs, thought

this was the height of romance, lights out,

the sunset bleeding over ploughed earth.

We were brats (no other word for it),

sneaking up out of the darkness, like extras

in Lord of the Flies, to bang on steamed windows,

then make a run for it through convenient scrub.

Each time we might have been so easily caught –

here on this shaped and archaic landscape

not so far from where decisions had been made

whose consequences played out here –

here where we had no idea what history lurked

between parked cars and would-be lovers

escaping some great vision for the future

not so different from those striated gothic facades

from which everything once must have seemed

uncluttered, safe, unchaotic.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

В кухнята/In the kitchen

Adventurous light plays on vegetable surfaces,

out to remind us, it seems, that this is the morning after.

We’ve been talking as if bare, crude facts

were nothing more than annoyances.

Across the way, cleaned washing balloons

in chance wind currents and lime-green leaves

make love a plausible topic of conversation.

In the distance, a city does what it has to do

and email messages stack up to not much at all.

You are paring and peeling hot peppers

while the job I was meant to do goes undone.

The kettle’s drilling boiling sounds out

the proximities of silence. That was my promise,

I think, to reach a certain temperature, to make the tea.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Нарове/Pomegranates

Stilled ripeness behind a wall

in the Black Sea town of Sozopol ...

Fig jam greens refracted sea-light,

jars stacked up on foldaway tables,

but it’s the lure of hidden fruit

that’s proving food for thought

on these staggered, staggering cobbles.

And so because land ends here

in a tumble of rock, you might

have to bear with me, back

over a stony unadopted route

or out along coastal defences.

Cloudbursts of gulls shadow

wakes of returning fishing boats,

though we’re already in the shade

of balcony overhangs and a care

not to abide the inferences

clamouring in every word.

And so because here we are

browsing at a souvenir shop,

we’re hoping to find a thread

to hang shells and semblances on,

while waves not so far below

furl and roll along the shore

and there’s hidden fruit behind a wall

in the Black Sea town of Sozopol.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Посред бял ден/In broad daylight

За Марина/For Marina

In parkland we’re lit with August sun

and afternoon strollers disperse, coalesce

around a lily pond’s surface tessellations.

It’s all coming together in so many words

and we’re taking up again conversations

time and the geography failed to disrupt.

Almost inconceivable not to be here,

with summer verging into plenitude

and shrub blossom haloing bronzes

of those who’ve created, preserved,

marking pathways through the trees.

A singular brightness – like the one

you bring to the humble, everyday –

hazes out squared city horizons.

Were it night, I’d be thanking lucky stars,

though there’s no need: you’ve already

brought to light those of your own making.

In the grounds of a seminary, we’re talking

of eye-tints, perspective, minutiae of

a given world we both have our cares for –

only now I see it, here amongst leaf shadows,

illuminated for us, this place, your gift.

17 July is St Marina's Day in Bulgaria: this poem is for Marina Shiderova - a wonderful collaborator and friend with love and gratitude on her name day - Tom.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Орхидеи/Orchids

He came home with them,

laid them down

on the dining room table,

cellophaned exotica.

My father, back from India

or the UAE, took off

his uniform, returned to

light through French windows.

In that room, whose furniture
pieces were like so many
precise coordinates,
Mum vased those bright flowers.

They were part – I'd assume –

of their latest negotiations.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Рибарска приказка/A fisherman’s tale

The softest plunk in near-dark

where bait and hook sink

through water. A turning point

of sorts beckons in cloud banks

beyond a pub car-park’s clunked doors.

It’s not what we’re about:

it’s almost a distraction, in fact.

Overnight, we watch trees

lose shape and disappear.

At dawn, they reassert themselves.

As do we, and the small, frail fish

we’ve yanked up

from entirely predictable depths.

There’s a photo in the cupboard.

It's that or something else

which might put us in the frame.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Задължителни грешки/Mandatory errors

From balcony to balcony,

the summer cats are singing.

They're saying: ‘I wish you

were here.’ But I know

they can't understand

the meaning of such words.

The city is trying to sleep,

but the birds have gathered

for a party and the wires

dance between apartment blocks.

For some reason, I can

only think about eyes –

about eyes which 

promise, suggest

a thousand possibilities

(or simply the sea),

but nevertheless remain

in someone else’s mirror.

It’s almost time to admit

that this is how

the tale ends – except,

there, listen – in the song

of the cats, the dance of the wires,

you can hear a new story

about a mermaid’s blue eyes.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Колелото в парка/The bicycle in the park

Misjudging connections, I’d arrived

too soon in that only just known town

and in the last remaining phone booth

the rattling, rejected coins were proof

that I’d not been able to raise you for money,

let alone love.

                        

Yet not so far away,

paths some noble obliged to have cut

opened onto vistas of a municipal park

and a bicycle unchained by a lamp-post

spoke of an irredeemable trust.

Perhaps some couple not unlike us

rode tandem here, or a lunchtime escapee,

brained by air-conditioning,

pedalled out to find the real thing -

who knows? Or perhaps it was yours.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Чайник и зеленчуци/Kettle and vegetables

I learnt the word патладжан early on.

Not long after, amongst refurbished stalls

beyond the central market, aubergine

wasn’t on the list, but I took back

raspberries the colour of arterial blood

and improvised a breakfast overlooking

cafe tables, fronds of urban scrub.

I would be there now. By crevices

of stone walls and tram incursions,

we’d be sipping black coffee

and waiting on friends. But here,

in our kitchen, I’m making tea

and патладжанът on the side

is once again an aubergine.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Езерото/The Lake

We sat in that garden, just below

mountainous scenery. It was

recognising some words

in his language which got us

talking. It tasted

like the back-end of my life,

like something I’d never expected.

The great gulls swung in

across the distant water.

I’m partial, I’ll admit it.

At the end of the pontoon,

slim bodies dive into the lake.

We walk through town later

and sit in this familiar bar.

The football results are on

and I’m sneaking up an alley

to get a good signal. In no more

than a few days, I’ll be home.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips