Митология/Mythology

За Док/For Doc

Life comes and goes. In the depths of it,

there's death stripped back as far as winter

and what we might receive. It’s how

you look at it in the angle of the sun

and memories trying hard to occupy

an absence. Our intention was

to walk that wintry spine of hills:

unlikely explorers, advocates

of the open air. Only caught now

in this pub, we’re sinking pints

and raising whatever we’ve got left,

an almost perfect architecture of myths.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Майка и дете/Mother and child

A moment of quiet contentment, fading

into sleep: a memory in that – recalled

partially at least while the world

and its words shift out, make space

for the barely registered breath

and its sudden insistence,

distant footsteps and, further still,

the screech, the squeak of a tram.

In the light from an uncurtained window,

everything else is no more than a rumour.

The silent hands move. Outside,

avenues spread like an arterial system,

a map of possibilities which

you might want to take or not.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Чупене на стъкло/Breaking Glass

Bleak start to the year and the loss

of those who went and saw

no flinching at what was no more

than an all-too-familiar inhumanity.

Snow falls and the ghoul Death

flirts at the edge of fairy tales:

nothing in comparison pales

as we play back that history.

Across anonymous border zones

there's reclaimed land –

the geography of what might be found

in these thickets and copses.

Tomorrow what this landscape says

will be interpreted in myriad ways.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Нансен/Nansen

Born facing north, frozen vacancies,

with an eye to the footloose and rootless,

who’d have known that in aftermaths

of peace negotiations, he’d have his say?

Though an idea foiled by best intentions

couldn't stop the would-be hard men

striking out to make their mark.

A recurrence of polar frustrations,

forced decisions on diminishing time,

like being locked into arctic currents

and the same pragmatic recourse –

the difficult delayed not by geography

but politics in those later years.

From the brow of the Fram, he’d not

have seen such complexities, heard

little more than their distant clangour

in the grating screech of pack ice.

Known for his polar expeditions, Fridtjof Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his work with refugees.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips