16 | Poetry by Zdravka Evtimova, Winner of the Best Bulgarian Novel Award (Union of Bulgarian Writers), Razvitie Literary Award for Best Bulgarian Contemporary Novel, Anna Kamenova National Fiction Award & Book of Europe Nominee

Poem of Stones

Even the smartest men could not imagine
I had invented them.
My father, the old volcano, said, “It was a wrong thing to do, son.”
I am dust and clay. I am granite and an endless ruby.
The men I created cut me into slabs, baked bricks out of me,
and turned me into houses for their children.
I had waited billions of years
for men to grow up and learn the language of time.
I am a stone ball they call a UFO.
I created them because even a stone is lonely.
“They steal. They kill,” my mom, the red-hot magma, said.
“They gobble the food that belongs to somebody else. They get
somebody else’s girl and his job. They are powerful.”
But sometimes they wake at night, feeling a dull pain in the chest.
They remember they had stolen and killed.
This dull pain is the language of the billion years.
I am a stone ball that created men out of loneliness.
They think I am a UFO.
I hope that a day will come when
they will understand the language of time,
and then their children will know my true name: the earth.

Zdravka Evtimova

Zdravka Evtimova is a Bulgarian writer. Her short stories have been published in 32 countries in the world. Her short story collections have been published in the USA – Carts, Time to Mow, Parable of Stones, Impossibly Blue; in Italy – La donna che mangiava poesie; in France – D’un bleu impossible; in China – Stories from Pernik; in Greece, UK, Israel, Canada, and Iran. Her novel Thursday was published in the USA, UK, and China; her novel In the Town of Joy and Peace was published in the USA, Italy, and North Macedonia. The novel The Same River was published in the USA and in Italy. Her short story Blood is included in an anthology of recommended readings for teaching literature in junior high schools in the USA and in the high school curriculum in Denmark.