Kristin Dimitrova

In Search Of The Point

I asked the sky:
“Why am I here?”
It swallowed my words
and waited for more.

I didn’t know what more to say.
I asked the earth:
“Why am I here?”
Its mountains shrugged their shoulders.

I asked the fire:
“Why am I here?”
It was crackling so much
it didn’t hear a thing.

I leant over the well
and asked the water.
“Why am I here?”
“Come down, I’ll tell you,” it replied.

“Ah, no,” I said.
“Only asking.”

The Border

My daughter asked me
if I’d brought her chewing gum.

I told her I hadn’t,
but I was there all right.

She retorted that I was one thing
and chewing gum quite another.

I pointed out that she couldn’t
always expect something nice.

She set me straight:
“Not something nice, chewing gum.”

And although the sun was shining
and the birds were singing over one another,

and the grass in the park was avidly green,
my daughter was crying her eyes out.

There’s a happy world and an unhappy one
and between the two – some chewing gum.

While Travelling

In the train
a Hungarian woman
with no front teeth
was telling me
how two of her three
children died,
and the eldest son

was in America now –
here’s their photos,
here’s him,
here’s him and his wife.
She smoked Bulgarian cigarettes
or rather one very long
cigarette from Budapest

to Bucharest, and said:
I no longer have
anything to live for.
She said it simply,
plainly, evenly,
with the dignity
of the toothless.

Classmates

“That’s how she was with me, words
like acid, like sharp stones
right in my eyes – the woman
had a nagging cold, but even without it
she would have spoken ill – and I
say to her: I regret our
seventy years of friendship.
I really regret it!
I don’t want to see you again.
Never again. Forever!”

I nod in sympathy. I can’t stop thinking
how little space for the fulfilment of threats
a seventy-year-old friendship leaves.

Conversations With The Undying

Cherubs with swollen cheeks
gather over the city
and the last rays of sunlight shoot
through their downy wings.

The sunset is sunrise second-hand.

I gave blood
and under an old second-hand coat
I’m hiding a very proud body.
Its liquid blood, corpuscles
and the like are waiting,
bated, in a jar, to haul
someone
back to life.

Unknowingly, I’ll whisper
wake up, wake up.
My blood cells, slightly used,
will lead you back
by the hand.

I’m probably second-hand myself.
I’ve come back many times and the world
fits me like a loose-fitting coat.

Cherubs, winged buttocks
with eternally child-like faces,
I’m trying to tell you about life.

There’s no way you’ll get it.

KRISTIN DIMITROVA is a Bulgarian poet, writer, and translator, the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Jacob’s Thirteenth Child (1992), A Face under the Ice (1997), Talisman Repairs (2001), The People with the Lanterns (2003), and Dear Passengers (2018). Her fiction includes the novels I Will Be Back For You (2022) and Sabazius (2007), as well as three short story collections: Love and Death under the Crooked Pear Trees (2004), The Secret Way of the Ink (2010) and Give Me a Call When You Arrive (2017). Dimitrova has won seven awards for poetry, four for fiction and two for poetry in translation. Works by Dimitrova have been translated into 29 languages and published in 38 countries, including Belarus, Czechia, India, Ireland, Mexico, Romania, Switzerland, UK and USA. White Pine Press is to publish a selection of Dimitrova’s poems translated into English by Tom Phillips, A Moment Short of Perfection, in the USA in early 2026.

About the Translator:

TOM PHILLIPS is a UK-born poet, translator and lecturer currently living in Bulgaria, where he teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. His translations ranges across a broad spectrum, from contemporary poetry and fiction to academic studies, oral history testimony and the biography of Bulgarian footballer Hristo Stoichkov. Forthcoming publications include full-length collections of his translations of the Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev and of contemporary Bulgarian poet Kristin Dimitrova.