Дървета в Портисхед/Trees in Portishead

                                            Fog swags over the estuary make it hard to tell

                                            if we’re looking at mud banks, islets or the far coast.

                                            If you hadn’t told me, I would never have guessed

                                            these flat-topped bunkers below us on our shore

                                            had once been used for storing natural gas.

                                            Old industries litter the littoral while behind us,

                                            in the field beside the main road, there’s a mast

                                            whose warning siren they still routinely test

                                            in case of chemical leaks, aerial toxic events.

                                            Such dangers in the air if we but knew it.

                                            And so here in the aftermath of Christmas

                                            we’re doing what we can to make sense

                                            of all that’s changed and changing.

                                            The edge has come off the temperature.

                                            Walking back up the hill, beside fences,

                                            dustbins, smoothed asphalt parking spaces,

                                            you ask if these trees are silver birch.

                                           “Yes,” I say. “They are.” And the past

                                           makes friends with itself and for a moment

                                           consents to our leaving it utterly silent.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Честит Коледа/Happy Christmas

As has become traditional, we take a short break from art and poetry over Christmas and New Year and take the opportunity to say thank you to everyone who's visited, liked or shared Colourful Star.

2016 has been quite a year. On the one hand, there was a Colourful Star reunion in Sofia in the summer; on the other ... Well, if you're reading this post and are interested in cross-cultural collaboration and international dialogue, you'll certainly know what 'the other hand' delivered in June and November.

We've also seen a giant leap in terms of the number of people reading Colourful Star - so please do keep spreading the word.

There is no agenda here. Just a delight in conversation.

Much love and best wishes for the festive season and beyond,

Tom, Marina and Vasilena X

Many thanks to John Fru Jones for the photograph from the CS summer reunion in Sofia.

Музика довечера/Music tonight

Music across the water,

that's how it is – a sound

which skirts the smooth docks.

The way home attended

by arpeggios, vamped chords.

 That’s how it is:

the old bloke on the fiddle,

the others on flute and drum.

 There’s music tonight

across the water.

And that sense of playing,

a sense of playing out …

The spittle wiped

from the mouthpiece.

Everything might be otherwise

without the need for translation.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Изкуството на естествени структури/The art of natural structures

You talk of a stasis, a calm.

You walk with lighter steps.

Coming at the city from here,

we’re following trails

and I’m collecting clues

to using language like a compass

and letting it turn my thoughts

in its own directions –

much like these trees,

whose natural structures

can’t help but seem

to be offering options:

continue in this direction,

turn back or stand here,

branch out and look up.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

В Шкодра/In Shkodra

What drew me

            was the timbre

                        of the timber

when we walked

            along the hall.

                        That was no place

           

you’d want to leave

            in a hurry –

                        the smell of it,

that resinous smell.

            Or was it

                        our breakfast ritual?

Coffee, fruit

            and a smoke

                        on the terrace.

So much to learn.

            And how everything

                        can just wait.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Столът/The chair

Typically, I find it – this vantage –

on the all-but-last day I’m here.

I should have known. I’ve seen

the chairs put out for passers-by

on the forecourts of shops,

the pensioners with legs akimbo

beside the speckled hearts        

of water melon, the graded ranks

of tomatoes. And here,

at the neighbourhood’s edge,

I’m on a chair with wisteria trails

shading out the sunshine

on this almost last day of August,

with the traffic all but gone

and the end-of-season goalmouths

bruising the field where neighbours

walk their dogs. The city –

and its business – is that way,

past the trees whose roots explode

through the pavement, the café,

the cosmetic surgery clinic.

It won’t be long before I go,

but for the moment there’s this chair

and the open space

and that radio on a building site

which is playing a song

that once we thought was our own.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Сезоните на Живота/Seasons of Life

Well, for me, of course,

it's autumn – that sting

of age and what I’m part of.

In the room that’s still open,

I’m doing my best to hold on:

flies delve into plums

and that’s just what they do.

The brows of ships nose out

into a harbour beyond the point.

I came home once

and I had none of it.

But that was me just saying

how old I might have been.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Приключенията на една улица/The adventures of a street

Even the trees have some disquiet.

At the slightest disturbance, our dog

takes shelter, growling under my desk.

Circumstances close in. It’s as if,

in that downtown apartment,

the dripping geyser forewarned

apocalypse – or the afternoon music,

blaring out from some distant radio,

was soundtracking a situation

that I would never be able to grasp.

You can see the wood for the trees,

if you choose to – but that’s not

what I’ve been told and told again.

In the shadows of trees in the park,

we've found some space where,

flipping off caps from bottles of cider,

we can talk. Elsewhere, over the city,

the planes fly in and tomorrow

another bunch of people will be here.

The trams ruck and fret across old lines.

Clutching the handrail down into the metro,

I’m pretending there’s been no change.

At the ticket machine, there isn’t.

I bob and weave my barcode at the reader

and then take myself back up to the street.

I can walk home from here and count

the trees which unwittingly punctuate

the journey from downtown to home.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Ето/Here Is

Doing my best to remember

what's changed, I’m back

at the point before the point

when it happened:

a memory skirts the horizon

like a grace note.

Here is …

the colour of regret,

the geography of loss,

the physics of departure,

the thing that I was doing

just before the moment

you shouted for that knife

and here I am,

handing it over.

From here to wherever,

the flowers cling to granite,

assert themselves, flourish –

like a kind of relief.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Тези неща/These things

And now as things close in –

these questions unanswered

like the prows of boats

which sit and bob

in the afterflow

of opened lock gates

or the dart and dive

of seagulls strutting and fretting

on streets between apartment blocks –

we’re doing our best.

Love might be no more

than a question mark

but here at least we’re sure

as we’re ever likely to be –

deploying the same old signs,

old hands at this old game,

which we know now somehow

as well as we’re going to:

these habits and conditionalities,

the words we’ll say,

the flowers on the table,

this morning routine.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Познанието/The knowledge

All day struggling with vocabulary –

not lost for words or lost in translation,

but taunted by the prospect

of the ever-impossible mot juste

(so impossible we’ve had to borrow the term).

The gist, then, anyway emerges

like those blocks which sharpened

from the dawn on my first day in Sofia:

how I remember that –

first coffee, first cigarette –

a while before the archetypes advanced

across some Jungian field

and I’m answering to

whatever it is I don’t understand,

reaching for and then grasping

that precipitous apple.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Сезонна гледка/Seasonal view

It’s autumn. No other way to say it.

The nights are indeed drawing in

and suspended between branch and eave

an all-too-sharp spider is farming its trap.

Fruitful the colours, though,

as harvest mellows into decomposition

and the promise of winter on the tongue

stings with its hint of bitterness

as if there was any way to prevent

or divert the passage of the seasons

into early nightfall, the long dark

which presages those first dawns

of a warm and pre-emptive spring.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Повтаряне/Recurrence

Perhaps I am going to say this again

because recurrence is natural and

it seems that I have been here before.

Red flowers in white vases might be

a kind of landmark, a kind of punctuation –

a combination that reappears

but makes no specific demands.

Each time there are the same clusters

of petals, lines grooved into porcelain.

In my mother’s house or ours,

we’d take them for granted

and then regret it – these reminders

of what? Some thought about beauty

not being found in the everyday

but being an integral part of it.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Повтаряне/Recurrence

Perhaps I am going to say this again

because recurrence is natural and

it seems that I have been here before.

Red flowers in white vases might be

a kind of landmark, a kind of punctuation –

a combination that reappears

but makes no specific demands.

Each time there are the same clusters

of petals, lines grooved into porcelain.

In my mother’s house or ours,

we’d take them for granted

and then regret it – these reminders

of what? Some thought about beauty

not being found in the everyday

but being an integral part of it.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Гадатели/Seers

Beyond a landscape of hedgerows,

socket puddles, cisterned water,

the unadopted lane runs out

to a slick of mists. The hard shape

of a gate is a buried grid –

we lean on it and blow smoke rings

into softened autumnal air.

And it’s as if that moment’s

returning, gaining definition

without our knowing,

and we might see through

to something thickening.

We were 17. It was cold.

Across that willow waste,

the trees articulated promise.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Теменуги/Pansies

Thoughts, of course, in the language of flowers –

and mine not tidily gathered, but they exist

and somehow thrive in those parts

of the garden that we’ve forgotten.

And perhaps that’s the best way – to leave

things where they fall and just wait:

for the greenery to come first and then

dark petals, the yellow pristine eye.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Перспектива/Perspective

And now the taste of it, this autumn.

It’s there in the first brown leaves

that scud across the pavements,

the departure of experience

into memory and those other adjustments

I’m having to make, being home

and not really here.

                                    On the bridge,

love's hope gets locked as if fixing it

could be anything more than a promise

that might well declare its own failure.

This is where we live and what we have

to look out on: the edge of the city

and, beyond it, the lives which seem

to diminish towards the horizon

but nevertheless exist and have been lived.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Нейният ваза/Her vase

Uprooted from their places in the house

that’s soon to make way for some dream home

or business enterprise, brochures and letters

arrive as forgotten enthusiasms – fading

and patinas of dust make plain the known fact

of their age. I’d hardly recognise the hand

in these calligraphies of blue ink turned pale green.

Repossessing her memories, my mother’s,

after another generation’s settling in,

is a kind of re-acquaintance – as if here

she is again with stories of moonlight flits

and trespassing afternoons at London University.

In the bottom of the suitcase, cushioned

in newsprint from the year before she died,

her vase whose porcelain pattern reflected

in the candlestick table’s polished sheen

by the window on a September morning.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Петък/Friday

Laughter across the harbour

and the lights wink out Morse code

on the new refurbishments.

It’s not so late but suddenly again

I’m a long way from home –

being right in the heart of it,

as if in a foreign country.

And that’s somewhere I may well be

if you choose to believe the headlines.

Portrait: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips; photo: John Fru Jones

Към септември/Towards September

The slightest chill in the night air might be

autumn’s first breath or thoughts

of imminent departure – and I am trying

not to count how many more times

I’ll pass the building with its red display

announcing the current temperature.

The cyclepath’s emptiness stands in

for anticipated regrets – but then,

here I am again at home, where,

through the spill of courtyard light,

a bat is weaving figures-of-eight:

a surprise visitor to our block

and a reminder that possibilities

still unfurl across the distances

like a view of autumn hills.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Случайно/By chance

Somewhere on Graf Ignatiev or Shishman Street,

posies of wildflowers laid out on a tray:

brought in from the country, they’re almost lost

against another era’s architectural promises.

I was on my way to somewhere else,

but what if I’d stopped, bent down and chosen

one of those transplanted bouquets?

If I’d crossed the street where I’d meant to,

I wouldn’t even have seen them.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Сезонни игри/Seasonal games

Strewn amongst green crowns

below the balcony, horse chestnuts

are almost ripe here in August.

Our best conkers came from trees

around the church: they fell

and split on the asphalt path,

dark hearts in pulpy flesh,

like promises of future triumph.

There were tricks, yes, and theories:

soaking or baking them into hard skulls

to crack against each other –

and rapping our own knuckles

for our autumn playground sport.

Somewhere in a different part

of the wood, I was telling you this

as you tried to fathom the rules

of another improvised game.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Цветя от балкона/Flowers from the balcony

When you come I’ll bring you flowers from the balcony –

the pink ones whose name I can’t remember

but which bloom throughout the summer

even in the hottest weeks when pavement surfaces blister.

It’s not much of a gift (you can see that colour splashed

across the apartment block facades in any street)

but they’re the ones that grew then budded then opened

these papery petals all the time that I’ve been waiting.

You could say that they’ve measured out the days and weeks

but that would be to burden them with a weight

they don’t deserve: they are flowers, after all,

from the balcony and here is a vase you can put them in

and the table where you can leave them

in the first few minutes after you arrive.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Между заминаванета/Between departures

It takes little more than the suggestion

of a road to set me off.

The light’s particular

fall on woodland and that promise

of distance recall other terrains,

other journeys made or intended –

and how only last month

scrub silvered hillsides

and mist plumed a lake

en route to a different return.

No, it doesn’t take much to set me off.

A dispersing tangle of vapour trails

is merely the most obvious and I’d go

at the chance of those figs, that coffee,

the cut grass beside half-finished houses,

figures of sand dusting dry pavements

and the noise of headlines left behind.

No, it doesn’t take much to set me off.

And as the suggestions come ever thicker

ever faster, it would seem that – as in

those lines from a poem I’ve yet to write –

the urge to get away isn’t very hard to foster.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips