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