Ballad for the Future
–Ivan Radoev
Future – with what hands shall we pass you on?
You’re very far, you can’t make out our hands.
Our palms are clammy bank notes.
The lines of life, honor, duty and art
cross those of shame.
Under our nails is the mud from crawling
our way up to the point of our fall.
No one else but we ourselves
handcuffed us, comfortably, in the face of our fear.
That’s why we offer you our two bound palms
instead of unfolded wings.
The only remnant
of shame we felt
was when we buried our mothers with communal fees,
then we dared not put
our hands on their foreheads
so they wouldn’t carry to the grave
the imprint of our horror.
Of course, there were shining ones among us.
They set off long ago, Future, to meet you.
But the ballad tells us
they went blind on the road.
Dénouement
–Lyubomir Levchev
You’re undressing as though for the doctor.
The thought shatters in my soul.
And suddenly
everything becomes fragile.
The little vase becomes a test tube.
The flower, a strange bacterium.
And you burst out laughing:
“Come on now,
ask me how I feel.
What’s ailing me.
Where I hurt…
Ask anything you like!
Just don’t pretend…”
I bend down mechanically.
“Breathe,”
I say.
The air draws you deeply into itself.
And you vanish.
The bed retains your warmth –
torn garment of the fugitive.
But you’ve wrenched yourself out.
For good.
Perhaps you’re already sliding down
your memory.
You’re crying.
The zipper of your skirt is broken.
And your voice is shattered.
I hear:
“Farewell, my love!
You I once longed for, farewell!
I wish you all the best –
and part of my pain.”
The Soul
–Nedelcho Ganev/Неделчо Ганев
The flame is full
of thick tree shadows
In it shrivels
the forest’s soul.
I gaze at the fire
and the light’s morse code transmits to me:
-the flame is your life:
burn small
and you’ll die out.
And this:
-the flame is your life:
burn big
and you’ll quickly turn to ash.
Small green devils
leap over the fire like kids
and play with it.
Vulnerability
–Fedya Filkova/Федя Филкова
I Without fear,
I take off my loneliness.
Full moon,
come lie in my womb!
II Your love brought death
so there was no pain.
The angel lingers
uselessly above me;
even the stroke of its wing
is a blow
after you.
III May the summer cure me of this love
that peers at me with dead fish eyes.
IV The day is vast in my tiny room,
halos gleam from my favorite books,
an open peony peers at me from its vase,
each sigh is a bridge that leads to infinity.
The Only One
–Elizaveta Bagryana
Was it you yesterday?
Is it you now?
Will it be you with me tomorrow?
That face I see
against my closed eyelids,
that silhouette with a changing shadow
walking with me always,
that voice at the morning
Wakening me, making me sing,
that name I call you by –
are they yours? are they yours?
Is it you or is it
the image and name
of my thirst,
that waits trembling
like the thirst of the fruited earth
for a rainbearing cloud?
Is it you or is it
the image and name
of my grieving
for that one,
eternal,
faithful companion –
as the moon is to earth.
Not a lot of information exists out there, particularly in English, about the late Bulgarian poet, Danila Stoyanova. Many years ago, floating along in a bubble of seeking out and reading eastern and central European women poets, I stumbled on this moving poem, written when Stoyanova was only 16. She died of leukemia when she was only 23. Prescient perhaps that she wrote about keeping life on par with death.
While, perhaps, the dying person fears death, s/he might treat it with this casual indifference or acceptance. Stoyanova in her poem; or like Margaret Edson in her play “Wit“: “am waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead. I’m a little sorry I’ll miss that.”
Death is surely the mystery that causes all manner of unexpected reactions among the living.
“Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.” -from Before the Fall, Noah Hawley
“One of the main reasons I decided to take the trip was to escape my grief. I thought, as people in adversity are wont to think, that a change of scene would help me escape the pain, as if we did not bear our grief within ourselves.” -from The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Danilo Kiš
And that in-between place where death is coming for someone, and his/her family fights the more powerful forces that death brings to the battle:
“Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end. More often, these days, medicine seems to supply neither Custers nor Lees. We are increasingly the generals who march the soldiers onward, saying all the while, “You let me know when you want to stop.”
But for most patients and their families we are asking too much. They remain riven by doubt and fear and desperation; some are deluded by a fantasy of what medical science can achieve. Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come—and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.” -from Being Mortal, Atul Gawande
Untitled
–Danila Stoyanova
They say I don’t love life.
That I love the dead tulip not the breathing one,
that I’m in love with the sob and feel only
the laughter of the sarcastic.
That to the sun I prefer the rain and the electric wind,
that in the raging spring I seek out pre-ordained tragedies,
that I take the shroud for something sacred,
that I recognize man only in his animal wisdom,
and that shoving with the mob intoxicates me.
—
Oddness, or deception?
—
I only know my funeral
won’t take place
because it’s hard to bury someone
who puts death on par with life
and lives equally in both.
