In Memory of Joseph Brodsky
Only fish know the price of freedom.
Your truth irritates the eyes,
lodges like a fishbone in the throat.
Life is its endless dream.
Sometimes it makes us weep at night.
A tear runs down the cheek
at the speed of light,
burning like Moscow skyscrapers
like wax candles.
The Ship Off Course
The ship has drifted off course.
Not by storm —
by silence.
North is a rumor
passed from captain to captain.
What we call direction
may only be movement.
Guram Kikabidze was born in Batumi, Georgia, in 1980. At the age of twenty-one, he moved to Moscow, where he spent the next twenty-five years. In 2025, after a long period away, he returned to Batumi, where he currently lives and works. Kikabidze writes poetry, short stories, and philosophical essays. His writing explores the fragile boundaries between memory and time, solitude and freedom, departure and return, as well as the quiet questions that shape human existence. His literary perspective has been formed between two cities and two contrasting cultural landscapes: Batumi, with its Black Sea horizon and Caucasian atmosphere, and Moscow, where he spent a quarter of a century. This experience of movement between places, languages, memories, and ways of life is an important part of his literary voice. Alongside his writing, Kikabidze works in real estate and investment, running a business with a partner focused on hotels, land and investment properties, apartments, and private houses and cottages. He continues to write from Batumi, combining his literary work with a life shaped by travel, change, and the search for meaning in the ordinary.