Хляб и свещи/Bread and candles

The ivy leaves sheened with frost

attend more changes in the weather:

an inhospitable climate, you’d say,

drawing tactful attention to

welcome contrasts indoors.

Bread and candles give out

their promises in this small space –

not great statements into the world

of headlines and outrage, but light

and sustenance, the waxy smell,

the taste of recent harvest.

And here, at this table, it’s as if

I’ve not had time to think of this before.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Гората и снегът/The forest and the snow

Being from the lowlands,

I didn’t see mountains

until I was sixteen, woke up

in the passenger seat

under violet Alpine crags

as if driving into illustrated pages

of a geography textbook

or coffee-table travel magazine:

a homeopathic dose of disbelief.

Still something uncanny’s to be made

of roads which climb from suburbs

through forests secluding fugitive stories

to the last point tarmac reaches

and beyond watery refrozen melts

the snowfields proper open:

after first demanding redefinition

words slowly diminish like the oxygen –

until here, and not even above the tree line,

they can be let go, left to their own devices.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Светлината на зима/Light of winter

Hardly star-crossed, though out in the cold,

my boots print meaningless hieroglyphs

across a blank page of snow:

each muffled footfall sinks,

as in dream-walking, back,

as if I’ve nowhere else to go.

Rooks fleck branching spines,

conjure distance with rasped crakes:

omen pedlars, disreputable seers

(though not their fault to be so misread).

As Orpheus knew, best not look back

nor too far forward either.

Hibernating fugitives will return

to inhabit their vacant spaces.

And of course across a clearing

there it is – the look light has

behind winter glass,

orange swag from a horizontal sun:

and that, love, though little,

will prove to be as much or more than enough.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Зима/Winter

The crunch, the give,

the taste of it, illusory solid

melting in chilled fingers –

and networks of tracks

recording night traffic

of cats, dogs, foxes, birds:

in winter light, snow insulates

tendril branches, softens

outlines of house and road,

promises remembered adventure –

the sense, on waking early, that

wrapped up warm in hat and coat

we’d be exploring a temporary world.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Щастлива Нова Година/Happy New Year

Again one calendar announces its own end,

while another makes its promises –

and across a translucent sky

jet trails arrow eastward.

The cherry tree is a globe

of bare branches, a neural map

of something waiting to be achieved.

The holly’s still in fruit.

How easy to be hard on yourself

in this hiatus between routines

when love and friendship have a chance

to come into focus: not so much a time

of renunciation and resolution,

as a time of gifts and prospects.

The image here is one of the illustration's from 'Nicholas - The Stolen Reindeer', the children's story which is now available as an app, with a text by Tom and illustrations by Marina. 

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips