Kapka Kassabova

Kapka Kassabova Poems

I imagine my life as a city
somewhere in the third world, or the second.
And I want to be a tourist
in the city of my life.
...

There is a field of frozen mud,
and in the middle, a pear tree
that bears fruit, still.
...

I consult my great itinerary of confusions
and it appears we've arrived
in the North. The sea-gulls glide,
inordinately large and slow,
...

Here they are, inside the album,
they squint in the September sun
of nineteen-fifty-eight,
of nineteen-eighty-four.
...

which

has over 300 natural lakes

is one of the oldest countries in Europe
...

After the long day
My father locks the doors
The windows
...

My father's breath is like a cave
of dripping stalactites and echo

My mother sleeps and in her dreams
the worst is happening, again
...

It's always strange to sleep in cities
you haven't seen in daylight.
You could be anywhere, anyone
could breathe next door while
...

Year one. At the end of a dusty road, find a malarial swamp.
Drain and fill with earth. Get sick. Curse the day you came.
...

which

has over 300 natural lakes

is one of the oldest countries in Europe
...

Kapka Kassabova Biography

Kapka Kassabova (born in Sofia in 1973) is a Bulgarian-British writer who writes in English. In the 1990s she emigrated as a teenager with her family to New Zealand, where she published her first collection of poems and a novel. She has lived in Scotland since 2004. As well as several more books of poems she has also written novels and travel stories. Kapka Kassabova is a critical observer of her old homeland. In her travels and writings she explores the tension between childhood memories and the current reality in the Balkans. Emigration, loss and the discovery of new places on the map of memory are the big themes of her writing. They are rooted deep in her childhood in Communist Bulgaria. Today she turns her gaze on Europe’s new borders and makes a plea for changes in the Balkan region.)

The Best Poem Of Kapka Kassabova

I want to be a tourist

I imagine my life as a city
somewhere in the third world, or the second.
And I want to be a tourist
in the city of my life.

I want to stroll in shorts and baseball hat,
with laminated maps and dangling cameras.
I want to find things for the first time.
Look, they were put there just for me!

I want a room with musty curtains.
I want a view of rubbish dumps and urchins.
I want food poisoning, the dust of traffic
in the mouth, the thrill of others' misery.

Let me be a tourist in the city of my life.
Give me overpriced coffee in the square,
let me visit briefly the mausoleum of the past
and photograph its mummy,

give me the open sewers, the stunted dreams,
the jubilation of ruins, the lepers, the dogs,
give me signs in a language that I never
have to learn. Then take my money and let me go.

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