BULGARIA

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In the black funnel of my eye,
like a whirlpool of the years,
I see Bulgaria.
The sun jumping from poplar to poplar,
a bicycle of gold on old pavement:
like a tear in the eye.

Now a smell of burnt-out years.
Women in cotton print dresses
are baking red peppers
on the grass trembling by the concrete building,
and the wind raises the smell
for his flag--
it is inscribed with distant voices
of children
or ghosts.

The empty sky grows in the sunset.
It falls, bigger and blacker than the sea,
into the narrow funnel...

I hear an afternoon piano
in the timelessness.

The windows are many mirrors
to our sunset minds;
they are full of polished darkness
and blinding glitter.

But in the evening
the mirrors light up inside,
and we see people are living there.

And we see even further,
through meadows, songs, and forests,
back to childhood,
in a car behind the black steam engine,
a boy examines
a faded blanket:
in the patterns, monsters move,
and seas, and cities,
and the grass on a new grave... .

And all the politicians
(especially those who yellowed
through the decades
on the classroom walls),
all the front-page stories,
are a tiny detail
in the patterns of the blanket
in the hands of the child
in the train, hurrying through Bulgaria,
in Bulgaria, hurrying through time,
into the black funnel of my eye ... .

Sept. 25, 1994
Washington, D. C.

© Vladimir Levchev
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© Електронно издателство LiterNet, 12.10.2004
Владимир Левчев. Черна книга на застрашените видове. / Black Book of the Endangered Species. Варна: LiterNet, 2004

Други публикации:
Владимир Левчев. Черна книга на застрашените видове. / Black Book of the Endangered Species. USA by Word Works <http://wordworksdc.com>, Washington, 1999.