SUNIL SHARMA - POEMS

Sunil Sharma is Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 21 published books: Seven collections of poetry; three of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015.
 
Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA:
 http://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html
 
For more details, please visit the blog:
http://www.drsunilsharma.blogspot.in/
 
 

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A painter in the house of a fishmonger
​

​Once upon a time
in a tiny space
soared a spirit; mixing the dull
with sublime and undaunted by the closing walls
of a one-room structure that mimicked
a patriarchal home, or  almost a replica of old power games
played out in unequal homes.
 
And a gruff owner who sold fish and came to
lodge a female, a secret artist, thus changing forever the place-history
and personal micro-narratives involved, in an otherwise, forgettable drama
of small lives.
 
 
There, in that shack, another might have felt
confined and slowly wilted by poverty and neglect
 but not Maud Lewis
 
who re-discovered her
talent for colours and lines
 
and painted all the rough surfaces
available to her fingers, bent with arthritis.
 
Through cards, flowers, animals, birds and meadows
she could
 
transcend a limited world of bias and poor opportunities denied to women
 
Maud gradually found some comfort
in a cold household, turning it into a living museum where fluttered the butterflies and cats and snow rushed in, on the once-drab walls, inner-outer, her imagination and memory producing stunning works that beckoned.
 
… a call from the White House changed the sordid situation
and made the everyday figure into a cult.
 
The natural scenes---vibrant and cheerful
are now folk art's unique heritage!
 
The woman, once abandoned and ridiculed
became a world-famous painter
that caught everyday realities, in strokes and lines
full of exuberance, life and vitality.
 
Few stories with depressing beginning
could have such a fairy-tale ending!
 
 
from the vantage July evening of 2018, a home battered by winds and rains of Mumbai,  a continuum gets formed between varied times and geographies,
 
a moment of renewal of past in the present
contexts different merg seamlessly
 
artworks ferry the distant viewer
back and forth
across a strange life-journey.
 
 
Muse-like Maud talks posthumously to an
Indian artist to
convert the ordinary into extra-ordinary
via words or paintings!

The autumn of a soul
​

​Still benumbed by the loss!
Things happened so fast.
 
One being becoming a memory
a garlanded and framed photograph!
 
Within an hour
living became dead
a full life stopped!
 
The voids opened up
deep within
painless
mind---in shock!
 
After the 13-day mourning
pain returned
memories became a Mother
that cared and cried with your
every fall
and smiled at your
uneven victory march!

A walk among the shadows
​

​...and i will take care and
walk softly inside the lurking
shadows
on a country trail
 
lit occasionally by
a wandering moon
shy as a maiden
revealing an
earthy face but once
that too---fleetingly
 
…and hugged by gentle trees
and lulled by
a murmuring river
watched by the spirits of the
nightly forest as our guardians
in that un-mapped region
 
i will walk softly, un-afraid,
holding the hand of my brother
in those landscapes grim.
 

Connections
​

​The room is as it is
except the departed
 
her absence lingers on
much
like the fragrance of roses
in an empty basket!

Dualism
​

​in death
we discover own mortality
 
the face, leathery
and pale
turned into a mask inscrutable
body, stiff
amid mourners
some genuine
others, official.
With breath gone forever.
Mystery, unsolved.
 
Leading to meditations
on godhood and the beyond
 
The pain
the loss
shrink the criers.
Finally,
life takes over---
what a brutal dualism!