For 6 September

As the sudden dusk mellows stone distances,

crowds shuffle down, find spaces to regroup

below the citadel on this poised thoroughfare.

We’ve been walking all afternoon

through suburbs and past the blue house

where that war artist lived – in the heat

our son complains, is demanding a drink.

The crowds are a memory from this time last year,

how they gathered into this space,

and if I listen, I’m sure to hear them again –

those exultant whispers, that ripple

at the furthest edge of history that we’ve reached. 

6 September is a national holiday in Bulgaria and marks the anniversary of the unification of the northern and southern parts of the country in 1885.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Shells

A flotsam of pebbles and shells

she’s gathered on our window sill –

they’re from strands and shores

we’ll have found time

to idle on, browse

for mementoes of summer.

Forgetful of each occasion,

they won’t take us back

to where, looking down,

she found mother-of-pearl,

 or striated curiosities

of granite, flint and jet –

yet on some cold morning

we might be close enough

to interrupt ourselves

with rough textures,

banded colours

accumulated over years.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Grapes

Suggesting a different season,

breeze through a classroom window

seems to take us back to his question:

‘When you’re happy, why bother to write?’

Does the bookshelf’s scarred parade bear him out?

Can happiness survive murderous dissection?

Only just too late, as students file away

over cypress-shadowed lawn,

I remember that day a few months before –

how, having climbed between stone houses

to the monument, we sat looking out

across rooftops, gardens, from the shade.

And yes, perhaps, there’s nothing need be said,

but here I am again, returning to coffee

in paper cups, scribbling down details,

happy all right to be trying to retrieve

the sweetness of those late-summer grapes.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Pine Tree

It was a place for kite-fliers and tobogganists,

the bare dome of a wind-flustered knoll,

but that chalk figurehead fronted a ridge

whose flanks and gullies were thick with trees.

That was more my scene – where branches raised

hopes of adventure in an elevated world,

where birdsong might be taken for promises,

and, running between the tall pines,

I’d be sure to come home reeking of their scent.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Baba Dana

That winds change and rain lifts,

that weather comes and goes,

that thought feels much the same –

its abruptness, its evanescence –

as it has always done,

that the imaginable may happen,

that we are momentary,

as unique as cloud formations,

that anticipation endures,

that life may be cumulative,

that the beauty of age is unflinching.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

A Cup of Cherries

Outside the kitchen, from the bench,

you look up into branches that you might call –

were they human – over-enthusiastic.

Sparrows, finches occupy

a wooden cascade.

Let them have their gluttony.

Their chirping arguments

are a kind of drama.

When it’s time again,

we'll remember –

go out picking with plastic bowls,

put cups of cherries on the sideboard.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Piper

Intrigued by affinities,

we’re talking again

on a favourite theme:  

how traversing

reputed distances

we keep stumbling

across common ground.

Maybe here’s something

we might take for a clue:

suggestive plangencies,

bagpipe music,

exiled to the shores

of Celtic Europe,

held tight to

in the Rhodope Mountains.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips