I feel like a bird the water tries to crush, but without this danger – what kind of flight is it? Accelerating competitor in front of whom is a hard rock.

The best place for nesting is in the eaves, barely a few centimetres wide, beneath which is the abyss. Grooming is primary care. The main occupation, done with skilful étourderie. The fear of water teeming with mammals down below, the first serious conviction.

The sea, which embraces and instantly retreats like a timid or attentive lover.

Defeated armies that withdraw with their dignity intact as after a refusal to dance.

Huge waves like full lips. Waves like ocean waterfalls. Waves that invade like a shower of kisses and don’t let you breathe.

Weightlifters lined up, lifting in perfect synchrony, pushing up the weight of the world record.

Foam – the sea rises. It grows without ascending. Without wanting to, it rises. Like everything that rises, by the way.

Armies of clouds conspiratorially moving on the bias.

Cirrus clouds that depict the giant skeleton of a bird in flight. And then a tractor’s deep furrow in clay soil.

Only a drenched bird, a bird completely submerged in tons of water, has the right to jump to another space.

The ribs of the waves.

Birds that land on moving water.

Foam upon foam.

A bird that playfully sews the air to the blanket of water.

Flowing, running water that floods an island of smooth, calm water.

Birds that proudly resist the wind, as if the right to do so transforms their action into a reasonable position.

There is no similarity between the tide and all other tides.

There is no difference between the tide and the eruption of a volcano or the sun.

from The Heart Is Not a Creator (2013) by the Bulgarian poet Yordan Eftimov, translated by Jonathan Dunne