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 The audience could hear unpublished poems by the two poets, as well as poems of a lot of bulgarian writers of the communist period (Georgi Rupchev, Boris Hristov, Konstantin Pavlov, Binyo Ivanov,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.