🎵 Title: “Watercolor Testament”

I was never a politician.
I was a man of rivers and unfinished skies,
Of mornings when the mist over the Balkan
Was more urgent than any headline.

They now file me under many names:
“Royal favorite”,
“Fascist banner”,
“A useful ornament of the old regime.”
But in the years when the light was my only employer,
I answered to just one calling:
To follow the water
Until it learned my hand.

I carried seven paintings to Germany once –
Two cyclamen, fragile as promises,
And five small landscapes:
Three from the Balkan,
A mill,
A river that did not know what flag flew above it.
They ask me now what those pictures meant.
To me they meant that Bulgaria existed
Where the hills broke the horizon,
Not only where the slogans did.

They summoned me as a witness
In the trial of Nikola Vaptsarov.
I swore to tell the truth
And said what I had seen:
A family that opened its doors to me since 1915,
A boy who became a man
With ink instead of weapons,
A talented poet,
A good son.
After his father died,
I no longer knew his path.
That was all I could say
Before the machinery of justice closed its book on him.

As for the king—
Boris liked flowers and mountains,
And my watercolors carried both.
We spoke about pigments,
About how a wash can keep the memory of a cloud,
About how a single violet can hold an entire spring.
We did not speak about decrees or secret orders.
I had no taste for such colors.
He saw in me a sincere painter;
I saw in him another pair of eyes
Looking for a landscape that might outlast his reign.

Then came the autumn
When allegiances were rewritten in red pencil.
They took me from my studio,
From the smell of wet paper and gum arabic,
And placed me in the Central Prison
For five months.
No formal charge,
No trial,
Just a door that closed
And the slow discovery
That even concrete has its own horizon.

I drew on what they gave me:
Wrapping paper,
Grocer’s ledgers,
Accounting forms.
Men with hollow eyes,
Bunk beds that creaked under history,
Faces turned toward a window
Too small to carry a real sky.
We were an exhibition no one had asked for:
Journalists, doctors, teachers,
Hooligans by decree.

Later they exiled me from Sofia,
Erased my name from the Union of Artists,
Turned my profession into an accusation.
A letter branded me “a hooliganizing fascist,
A banner for the fascists,
A friend of Boris the Third.”
Paper is patient.
Paint is not.
I watched the years settle like dust
On canvases that no longer saw the light of a gallery.

Yet even then,
When I was reduced to a file,
The rivers did not forget me.
They still flowed
Outside the cities of suspicion,
Waiting for a hand that had once learned their language.
I painted when I could,
Quietly,
On smaller sheets,
With fewer witnesses.

I will not pretend I was a hero.
I did not stand on barricades.
My rebellion was stubbornly modest:
To keep rendering the country in color
When others insisted it must be seen only in black and red.
To insist that a hill was still a hill,
Even when covered with slogans.

If there is anything like justice,
It will not come from the mouths of committees.
It will come from the way a child,
Years from now,
Looks at a watercolor of mist over the Balkan
And feels, without knowing my name,
That someone once believed
This land was worth seeing gently.

I was never a politician.
I was a witness in paint.
Remember me not as a slogan,
But as a man who tried
To let the water speak.

Lalu Metev, January 8, 2026.

I begin in the threshold where a word is not yet born and silence still remembers its breath. I write to shape what insists on being carried forward — not as ornament, but as revealed truth. My practice moves like inner weather: shifts of memory, tenderness, and the questions that refuse to leave us. Genres are rooms of one house — poems, essays, fragments, genealogies, musical sketches — each a voice in a single resonant chord. Even silence has its essential place in that chord. I attend to the small gestures that disclose identity; to the secret bridges between private life and collective memory; to the quiet architecture of the spirit that needs no ceremony. My aim is language that opens rather than decorates — windows through which readers encounter their own inner sky. Form, conscience and intimacy guide me: introspection keeps me honest; conceptual shape grants the invisible weight; moral sensibility anchors each phrase. My professions — poet, publicist, jurist — lean together: law sharpens clarity, poetry humbles certainty, philosophy teaches listening to what is unsaid. If a single thread unites my work, it is this: to transmute vulnerability into luminous strength and to make silence a place of meaning. I am Lalu Metev — Bulgarian poet, essayist and jurist. I write to preserve what is delicate and essential in the human spirit, to follow traces of memory and dignity, and to find where the personal meets the universal. This is the path I walk; this is the voice I follow; this is the presence I offer.