I remember my surprise on reading poet, Kapka Kassabova's poetry collection, All Roads Lead to the Sea.
She was writing of her new country, New Zealand and I was left thinking, does she imagine we're a small island nation or something ...?
Turns out New Zealand is very much that and not the continent I had imagined us to be.
And now, here I am, so many years and so many countries later, searching for her poetry collections, wondering if there was actually a poem with that title because here in Genova, it occurred to me that so many roads lead to the sea.
I found another of her beautiful poems ...
Love in the Dark Country
Kapka Kassabova
Tomorrow for twenty-four hours
I’ll be in the same country as you.
The sky will be constantly shifting,
the morning will be green, a single morning
for my single bed. And in the night
as the dark country goes to sleep
a church bell will measure
the jet-lag of my heart.
I’ll open my suitcase and unfold my life
like a blanket. In the dark country I will lie
all night and wonder how this came to be:
the one light left in the world
is your window, somewhere in the land
of thin rain and expensive trains.
And instead of maps, I have an onward ticket.
