On Friday 18 january, from 7 pm to 9 pm, in pub Hipster (Veliko Tarnovo) there was an event called ‘Silhouettes on silhouettes’, created by the two poets Aleksander Hristov and Neli Kirilova. The audience could hear unpublished poems by the two poets, as well as poems of a lot of bulgarian writers of the communist period (Georgi Rupchev, Boris Hristov, Konstantin Pavlov, Binyo Ivanov, etc.).
But there weren’t only the voices of the two poets. In fact it wasn’t only a reading, but it was thinking as a mingling of poetry, photography, video and music, so a form of synchretic art. In the very cozy pub there were photographs and printed poems on all the tables, so the audience could go inside the poetry before the event started. And even the event was particular, in fact the two poets, although present, didn’t read their poems live, rather in a video. In this video there were the two poets, in a sort of cartoon format, reading poems, with an image for every poem (when Hristov was reading the image was chosen by Kirilova and vice versa) and music in the background (Debussy, Liszt, but also contemporary composers). The video will be published in the future, so there will be a different possibility to see it. This was their third presentation and the first in this format, while previously they read poems live with music and images in the background.
Topics of the poems were life, death, love, loss, distance, all in a melanchonic and philosophical way. But it’s better leaves the poetry speaks, so here there are poems of the two protagonists of the event, enjoy them:
REFLECTIONS by Aleksandar Hristov It's like a treehouse Taken down By common hands of fire And there are branches Of memory Already burnt away Flames open The windows To your unblossomed dream So here See how the structure Of your childhood Disintegrates It’s like a wave Pushing through Your imaginary sandcastle And you witness The finality The cliché of the unspoken And the casualty That is your hope But you hold the staircases With stubbornness And you shout commands To all the beaten knights Of thoughts Drowned in unfinished battles In their own rivers And the water Leaves the dead pieces Of your toyed youth For you to bury It’s like a jar Filled with stagnant ashes With stagnant sand From that glassy summer When the treehouse Was burnt down And the waves Broke down your castle Your fireproofed solidity Your homelike innocence It’s like a jar Down on the ground Down in your mind Down Mirroring your life It’s like a mirror Beneath your feet Move and break it Standing still And trap yourself In reflections – When you cannot see Anything but What you cannot Bring back to life Anymore Poems by Neli Kirilova
If he were not afraid of time, today would be a day for kites paper boats letters in bottles, humming an old song. If time did not fly like a kite, did not sail away like a boat, did not stay in our hands like a letter If time were not the melody of our existence in rhythm and in steps we would have a day for this. ***** Our time slowly runs out between the bars. It falls on the sheets of а children's book to colour the black and white outlines. The world is on the pages. But why does every figure think that it bears the cross and slowly drowns in the cold tones. As down, on the corner of every page some kind of Triboulet plays with the globe аnd smiles at the Crusaders. ***** Autumn, crumbling memories like leaves fallen accidentally on the palms of a wanderer. The beauty will remain briefly – pressed by the fist, silent, collapsing in its last season, white to transparent: it will leave. And then we will need to search for ports again, where even the sea continues its path.