За 24 май

Как да пиша, но с букви

от една древна азбука,

със звуци от сърцето?

Те носят дълги години,

спомени и истории:

една култура стои тук

в техните обикновени линии.

Тя следва моите ръце,

които създават думите,

които откриват карти

в най-малките кътчета.

Без тях – никаква любов,

никаква болка, никаква песен.

"Красиви са," казва тя.

How to write but with letters

from an ancient alphabet,

with sounds of the heart?

They bear long years,

memories and histories:

a culture stands here

in their plain marks.

She follows my hands,

which make the words,

which discover maps

in the smallest places.

Without them, no love,

no pain, no song.

“They’re beautiful,” she says.

24 May is Bulgarian Education, Culture and Slavonic Literature Day or Ден на българската просвета и култура и на славянската писменост. It is also St Cyril and Methodius’ Day, commemorating the brothers who devised the Glagolitic alphabet from which, in turn, Cyrillic is derived.

Images: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips (with help from and thanks to Iliyana Mircheva and Tsvetomira Peykova)

Bulgarian Monastery

A freshness as after rain

in this deeper seclusion

where our putative span figures –

from gardened beds to slim trees –

in an architectural scheme,

epitome of calm between storms.

Navigating corridors and cloisters,

we thicken patina and paintwork

with thoughts we’ve brought to bear

from guidebook précis,

biography of this or that artist,

history of dates and erasure.

By a bench on these stone flags,

some internal murmur frets,

pushes out into a penumbra

where others meanings

might wait to be distilled

from a precinct’s iconic silence.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Kettle

 So simple in construction –

but who first thought

to fashion that shape,

add spout and handle?

And who before them

found that leaves dropped

into boiling water

blossomed, made tea?

Or that clay transformed

to porcelain? And who

took fire and tamed it?

An untraceable regression –

but one which leads back

from this corner of the kitchen,

through centuries, millennia,

to a moment of discovery

on the margins of
a vast and unmapped plain.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Гергьовден

Inside this hushed rotunda, frescoes,

haloed figures, patches of worn plaster

around serpent-dragon, horse and lance

are like a map of endurance,

faith held to and held onto

through years of omen and eclipse.

We move through incense traces,

iteration of prayers and blessings,

not so far from shopping hall and traffic,

along a cusp of the sacred and shadow,

where everything might be laid out before us

in resurgent light across the iconostasis.

6^th May is Гергьовден or St George’s Day in Bulgaria. 

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Tulips

They seemed to bloom for weeks,

banks of tulips in the college yard –

bright as crimson envelopes you filled

with mementoes, drawings, news.

Hurrying back from the post-room –

a student in daps and my own world –

and rashly tearing open what you’d sent,

I had to stop beside those vivid beds:

breeze-taken, a lock of your red hair

scattered across those sun-dappled flowers.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Valia Balkanska

Always a story there if you stop and look:

hers begins in mountains and meadows

and will not end until, on some distant planet

or in the emptiness between stars,

the fragile messengers we've sent

meet whatever their fate might be.

We will not, cannot know –

but might take some hope in thinking

that these traces of ours will be found

and that the song of a хайдук rebel,

music drawn from the grass and earth,

will be heard beneath unfamiliar constellations

will sound beneath an otherworldly sky.

Valia Balkanska’s recording of the Bulgarian folk song ‘Излел е Делю хайдутин’ features on the Golden Record, a selection of the sounds and music of the Earth sent into space on board the two Voyager probes. The song's on YouTube here. 

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

On 'Twelfth Night' (For Shakespeare's 450th)

I was tempted to ask it myself

as the ferry ground against

seaweed-greened harbour walls:

‘What country, friends, is this?’

Overlooked by abandoned palace,

remnant of some earlier kingdom,

we pulled in by a customs house

with handwritten welcome sign

and sprouting wire palms

across the dockside development area.

Who knew what we would find?

In a dark cell,

perched above shale-beds

in this corner of a promontory,

I’m overlooking absences

of a neatly turned plot,

a plunging watercourse.

‘We’ll come out of it

all right in the end,’

I think I heard you say.

Over our heads, birds plunge

and swoop into the thermals.

Stripped down to no more

than a bare, forked fear of heights,

I’m walking back up the slope

into a myriad coincidences,

opportunities for love amended.

23rd April marks the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth - and we wanted to celebrate it on Colourful Star, not least because Marina took inspiration from Shakespeare for the design of the project's logo. 'Twelfth Night' seems an apposite choice of subject for this post, because the answer to Viola's famous question at the beginning of the play - 'What country, friends, is this?' - is 'This is Illyria, lady', effectively locating the play in SE Europe.

Images: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips