The days, months, years, and decades of educational arguments over world politics and matter-of-fact science, which I and my son have had, though both of us simple philologists and both comparatively poor, seem to be asking an alternative question worth developing into a literary work: How can a future help its own past, even if in the same place; and how can a present help its own self if it is separated in two complete parts, each in a different sphere.
The question has much of Bulgaria’s past and present, of the people who left it to live abroad, of the people who came to live in the country, the people who need just the area, the people who need just the power, the people who are tools in the hands of other people, the people of difference and similarity, the people who act instinctively, the people who scheme and wait, the people of all the different spheres and scales, the people of all the different destinies and lives, everybody really.
In line with my future work, here is a retrospective poem:
Rhyming
There’s no hurry to describe the seasons
Enough to look and see the people going past
They seem to liken their all lives’ meanings
to natural divisions by a cast
The autumn person will be nice and cold
like autumn trees which, wet, wait for the night
with pine-tree needles scattered on the ground
and air that’s so strong though light
The spring-time person will be happy, flying
towards a flourish or a conquest
like spring which gives its blessings: arming
the seeds with the potential of days next
The summer person is the scarest to notice
the mist of heat and dust blur off the sight
The summers are forever, ever, thirsty
Don’t get the fruit they’ve grown, working hard
The winter person is the most lucky
Naught there’s to steal, naught there’s to take
The winter, itself, takes beneath its carpet
all, even dreams of spring which will be back
There’s no hurry to describe the seasons
Just say ‘hello’ to each coming phase
If you don’t match, you won’t be greeted: reasons
for this a lot, but you won’t be off-chased
V.P.T. 18.10.2003
