WORLD POETS MAGAZINE

  How much love   Sometimes you ask me How much I love you I tell you honestly I love you as much As I love myself   This upsets you You want my love for you To be greater than my love for myself   You want to live your life in fiction I prefer to live in poetry That’s the only difference Between the way we love     I’m unable to leave this city   1.   A keen line of poetry troubles me like water She has travelled with me from the village to the city Here, sometimes she supports me, sometimes I support her.   Thanks to her I never got bogged down by the garbage of my ego She always looked after me as if I were A pure, clean, innocent child Expecting nothing in return   2.   In every city I was able to live like a human being I was able to comprehend that every city is one long poem   While a half-done line or a stray word Can be given to us by some unknown city   Which is why before you arrive in that unknown city, Kno...

     * They said it's raining heavily   they said hail is falling   I haven’t felt a thing   you’re in love they said   and closed the window of my heart     (Translated from the Bulgarian by Tom Phillips )          *   You’re not expecting this poem   you probably won’t read it   you’ll carry on undressing and dressing and your smile will remain like a Christmas decoration year-round   why then write it at all?   it’s like reaching out a hand to someone without arms and immediately pulling it back in horror   in case they grab it shake it and cheerily call out   hello     (Translated from the Bulgarian by Tom Phillips)           *   Why do you have to die so casually   just as if your parents are sending you to bed precisely when the night’s promises are taking shape   think of something   say that you’ll be good   that you...

  Summer in the Homeland   This Lucifer, this Cerberus, this tsar, this neighbor man – ten rows of steel teeth, a mask renewed each night and each day – this one who never sleeps, behind all masks his mouth in his eyeless skull, a Minotaur who consumes virgins, but has no comfort, whose heart festers – is he eternal?   I pat my pockets, my prescriptions all in a mess – where are agape and eros and where did I put philos ? All the expiration dates passed long ago, nothing is fresh!   No answer, but yesterday in the sky I saw swallows again, tiny splinters of summer from the south, and at night perhaps you, mother, led me upward to a higher place, in the mountains where the horizon offered my eyes light:   I breathe the smell of pine sap and fir needles, of snow, home, and an unnamed country.                                                 ...

  When everything is lost   The clock did not stop but hours no longer show on Time’s dial, which has come to a standstill, contemplating.   Perspective still works, but objects are no longer clear against the pure expanse of unnamed Space.   Life has not ended but death no longer looms at the horizon waiting for someone to rise up sometime, somewhere, in the land of oblivion...   Everything is as it used to be though nothing has meaning when lost in a timeless space, in a spaceless time…   (English version by Adrian G. Sahlean)     That instant   A few words, you told yourself, just a few—and created a story whose present is yesterday by now, just as tomorrow will be past for another story left behind, lost forever...   One word, you told yourself, just one— and you are on your way the unknown, that unexpected step, free to think of who you are and are not, of that instant in which you can become and be you.   (English version by A...

  Hectors   Life hauls us by the tongue. So that no howl is heard. So we can’t taste the relief of groaning. It finds us ready. Each time we stick out our tongue to it mockingly irrationally certain planners of our future life grabs it and hauls us over the bloody dust of truth wrecked Hectors shattered. With our hasty mind painting a zero spilled on the dust. Each time the vain I will. escapes through our                 teeth death grabs us and hauls us by the tongue.   But songs are made even without a tongue. And our mind folds the zero over the dust. Makes an infinity of it. Hectors finally victorious. Because wholesomely mortal. Their whole body a glorious heel A heel of which war makes a tongue unyielding.   (Translated by Angelos Sakkis)     In the constellation of Lyre   My eyes could hear the music before it even touches my ear. It was tasted everywhere. In the blu...

  Rhythms Compose the Way One’s memory stirs Where shades have deeply buried shades Rottenness thirsts for the calamity of fire Stars sleepwalk Falling into thin dew   Bitter leaves crawl over scalding coals In their breath pine leaves shroud pine cones Someone is putting away his traveling case   Shadows that hide in antique objects Still tremble in fear when their names are called Tears blur the epochs   In an irrational movement The ground lies on its belly to support the levee A stream of white smoke rises up A fall pours down from layers of dying leaves   Deep tombs open in one’s chest Revealing the arterial paths Corrupted by many inverted rooftops With stains on the lime-washed web-ridden walls Inside which the dull tapping sounds Urge a run towards the door.     Lotus   The mute patches of mud withhold their sparkle Strained eyes compact space A figure Stands on the lotus pedestal and delivers   Water weaves together Waiting for t...

  In Aristotle's school   In this place, figs were cracking under the blazing sun, giving the philosopher's visions a taste of contemplation and wisdom.   In this place and on the amphitheater of the school, the philosopher was grabbing the ear of his wretched student, little Alexander, and teaching him slowly the difficult paths of life and ways to understand them! The disciple listened to him with great depth and intelligence, and he did not let anything miss his little ears.   In this place the walnuts fell in abundance, the squirrels rolled them into their mouths as the philosopher rolled fresh ideas into existence.   In this place, the great philosopher was getting old and the logic of philosophy was growing and expanding. The little disciple, was growing up and the gluttony in his terrifying imagination grew stronger. In this place, trees, birds, river and a cave learned the skills of philosophy from the great philosopher.   In this place, the phil...