Великден/Easter

A mystery of bells and the incense of Easter

bring us back from the vagaries of weather

while in my spent country indifference floats

like the breath of foul gas from a marsh.

The isolated beacons flicker like lights

on a runway’s approach, the city laid out

as something that might come close to hope.

I wasn’t thinking back then of much at all,

only around the edges of the familiar circuit,

the sky opened out and each brick, each joint

sat there in the sunlight as sharp and clear

as a recently discovered archaeological find.

In a museum of promises, mermaids busk

and frolick among annotated exhibits.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Геолокация/Geolocation

For one moment

I didn’t recognise the hand

that crushed the empty packet.

The brass ring was there

with my father’s initials etched

by his own, but there was a new map too –

as if someone had x-rayed a leaf

or tried to freeze-frame tideline ripples

or a mudbank’s rivulet crevices.

The vegetable age

has been doing its work

leaving me silly and surprised

at its defining marks –

half a century on, with skin

becoming tough and creased

as a gourd’s – now having to admit

that I know nothing so badly

as the back of my own hand.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Луковици на Лазаръс/Lazarus bulbs

Every spring they manage it,

having endured another winter

below ground – and no telling which

will deign to show themselves:

variegated, red or black.

It’s just what they do, these bulbs,

these mines, these nubs that sprout

and flaunt themselves out of need

to get noticed and breed.

We are much the same:

hunkering down through

another cold season

until at a touch of sun

we’re out amongst the tulip clumps,

gathering bunches we’ll produce

like magicians from behind our backs.

So many high hopes ride

on the language of flowers

that we trust and the language

of words which we don’t.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Първите принципи/First principles

Home now to a loquacious press

and headlines that contest, refute

or simply ignore the story.

Offshore oil-flares light

a roiling horizon, rusted dereliction,

while the powers-that-be (the ones

that would be ours) stay silent

or rebut a sense of entitlement.

Faces prepared with such care

insist on our acceptance:

they are only human

and have been playing at gods.

These apples sit in a bowl.

They’re here and they’re ripe.

They’re playing at nothing

but being themselves.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Хоризонт/Horizon

Sprawled against that, we were looking across

at industrial fieldscapes, the heft and yaw

of mechanical harvesting. Up the end

of the road, the big house stood

like some kind of manifestation

beyond the estate agent’s brief.

It would all be gone too soon.

On the platform of the railway station,

I was folding a ticket down to town:

a world long gone in the footsteps

every morning of the fathers

making haste for the 7.05 to London.

The capital waited at the end of the line

like a threat. My children don’t believe

that moment as the trains came rushing in

and over the all-too-near horizon

the doors swinging back and our getting into place.

Elsewhere in the woodland, the branches

hung and dithered as we have always done.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Баща и син/Father and son

For Nikola and Sam

The thump and weight of the newborn –

I thought I’d got used to it, but there,

amongst monitors, gowns, a choice

of CDs and the news of an assassination,

he rose up from IV scans and screamed.

In those conversational cross-currents,

some kind of bond began and down

corridors busy with emergencies,

he arrived in time – first breath

with the definite hesitancy

of an opening chord: outline

of a knowledge which would grow

and sharpen with every shift and jag –

the mornings waking up

with this whole new life between us.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips

Поглеждайки нагоре/Looking up

Flat out on a hillock,

we’d lie in wait

for perspective shifts,

the great curve,

the rolling of the earth.

Nothing so much

disturbed our view

of high-altitude jet streaks,

cumulus hatching into

the far sky’s

inverted geography.

Amongst ambitions

flitting and darting

across the flight paths

of swallows, we’d plot

dispersal routes, ways out

through bracken beds –

not back up the lane

but over fenced land

where cattle hulked

and lives in future tense

took shape with all

the fixity of vapour.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips