We Are the Tenants Poem by Kapka Kassabova

I consult my great itinerary of confusions
and it appears we've arrived
in the North. The sea-gulls glide,
inordinately large and slow,
over the vigilant stone, hungry for lost souls.
The hills are packed like cement,
the cemeteries lush with centuries of flesh.
The people smile with missing teeth
like hosts of a drunk party. Clearly,
the North has been here forever.

We on the other hand
have been nowhere forever.
We are the ones possessed by arrival.
We wake up with the cockroaches
of strange mornings. We smell the hopes,
the disappointments of months before.
Old mail piles up, their lives were temporary
just like ours. We have arrived in the North just
as we arrived in the South before, to sleep
above courtyards where immigrant children
call out to their future which is our present,

and the hills answer back with sea-gull cries,
and the chimneys of other times prop up the sky
like exclamation marks in sentences
that we must write in order to be real. Here,
here they are. But this is not enough.
We are the tenants of imaginary floors.
No matter how high the windows,
the ocean of the North remains invisible,
like the kingdom of some Pied Piper
who will sound, one day,
the horn of our departure.