Words, rain, Mozart: Three Poems by Sunil Sharma
Photo: Tom Carnegie on Unsplash
Poetry: ‘a sign / from the heavens, a sighting / rare, a visitor infrequent, in the / urban jungle.’
Words, rain, Mozart
Words flow
onto
the white screen
and
crystallize into
poems in flux,
grow wings
travel across the
time-space continuum
to
find homes in kindred
souls.
Rose petals, they
hug the wet knolls, meadows,
after the spring rain,
a pal passing through,
the Sunday-afternoon downtown,
Ottawa.
The self-same words
sprout as the
tender stalks of green
in a nook, on a book-lined
shelf of a manor-house,
where somebody with tapering
fingers, and long eye lashes,
full heart
played Mozart
on a snowy evening
to some invisible
friends, in an empty room
full of polished mirrors
and white doors, leading
to dark passages and casements
that opened over a cliff and a foamy sea
with a yawning mouth
*
Knock-knock
The
winters rain
falls
over
the concrete driveway, with a
long sigh, disintegrates into
tiny crystals that glitter, and
die.
It drums the roofs, spires and towers, a music
lost
on a deaf city, kisses
the flowers
with wet tongues, sends
shivers down
their slender spines.
The rain,
a native of the earth and
sky,
wanders off aimlessly,
a sad-faced hobo searches
for a sympathetic glance
from unseeing eyes,
she gently
knocks, twice,
cold fingers
against
the windscreen
of a luxury car
stalled
at the traffic-light,
on an early night
lit up
by light
diffused
carried on the back
of a damp wind.
*
Brief is every trance
The Snow-owl
settles down
on the icy arm
of
the backyard tree, a sign
from the heavens, a sighting
rare, a visitor infrequent, in the
urban jungle.
The Snow-owl
flutters wings,
looks with round eyes
at
the frosted glass with two red arcs
created by a lonely heart; the eyes meet,
transfixed by the divine
beauty
of the bird.
a curtain of snow falls,
the moment,
gone forever.
***
Sunil Sharma has published 27 creative and critical books. Among others, he has been a winner of the Golden Globe Award (2023) and Nissim Award for Excellence for Prose (2022) for the political novel Minotaur. His poems were included in the prestigious UN project, Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, 2015. He is the editor of the monthly Setu journal (English). You can find him on his website, Twitter: @drsunilsharma, and Instagram: @drsunilsharma.
