Author s Preface Selected poems Guram Kikabidze

Author’s Preface

I was born near the sea.
The sea teaches you two things very early:
first — that you are small,
and second — that you are free.
Many of the poems in this book were written across decades — in youth, in restlessness, in cities, in mountains, in silence. They are not arranged chronologically. They are arranged as a journey.
The sea appears often. So do wind, sky, mountains, trains, and distant ports. These are not decorations. They are states of being.
I have always been interested in one question:
How does a person remain calm inside catastrophe?
Empires collapse. Ships sink. Cities burn out in electric light. Desire exhausts itself. Love disappears. Time erodes everything.
Yet something remains still.
In my poetry, calm is not indifference. It is inner navigation. It is the helmsman when the wheel is gone.
I come from a country at the crossroads of continents, where histories overlap and cultures layer upon one another like sedimentary rock. Perhaps this is why I write about space — open sea, vast sky, deep snow — as a form of spiritual geography.
If there is one thread that binds these poems together, it is this:
freedom is not external.
It is a condition of the soul.
And even when the ship goes down,
one may remain calm.
— Guram Kikabidze

Calm
The helmsman runs
with a broken wheel in his hands.
Lost in the dark.
I am calm.
A wave drenches me
with salt water.
I am calm.
The ship overturns.
I am calm.
My ship goes
to the bottom.
I am calm.
I drift in a life ring,
clutching a log,
unknown where to.
Calm.
Thrown against rocks—
my head unbroken.
Still calm.
Some kind of island around me.
Seagulls shouting.
Calm.
I see food.
Calm.
I see natives.
Calm.
They will not touch me.
I do not look like food.
Calm.
In general—
we live.
Calm.
Autumn Gratitude
The rustle of fallen leaves beneath my feet.
The sky so high I cannot reach it.
With my foot I stir
a yellow heap.
Today
I befriended my fate.
In the park the leaf-fall rushes with the wind,
and words and thoughts wander out of step.
I thank everyone
that I remained alive this summer—
that mosquitoes and flies
did not devour me.
I thank the gods
for a piece of bread—
for tossing it down to me
even buttered.
I thank them
that my life is beautiful.
Within it,
like a pilot,
I thirst for the sky.
G.
Inertia
We ignite suddenly,
like a flash of magnesium,
and burn out
on the streets of a great city.
While somewhere far away
in the hot tropics
a magnolia has already bloomed.
We do not live
as we wish—
we move by inertia,
blindly,
at random.
Only in small villages
do you sleep deeply,
because the ringing of a telephone
does not wake you in the morning
like a tolling bell.
May 2, 2019
Guram Kikabidze
She Leaves
She leaves into the sleepless night—
daughter of winds,
chosen of the sky.
Into the smoke of billiard halls,
into the roar of evening subway trains,
out of restaurants,
intoxicated
with martini and Jack Label whiskey,
straight into the gazes
of thousands of men
caressing her sunlit body
with their eyes.
Through caf; doors,
car doors,
into dreams
where he has never been.
She leaves for expensive hotels,
travels to hot countries.
So many admirers have wanted her—
yet she is alone again.
Strange.
Black coffee
in drifting cigarette smoke.
A city maddened with temptations.
She leaves the world
where love no longer exists—
so solitary,
so passionate.
2001