“Renewals” and other poems by Sunil Sharma
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘The moment // compresses the competing / time-zones and geographies; // unites the widely-apart views / into / a single landscape of converged / colours.’
Renewals
Aurora
writes half the song
with her scarlet fingers
across
a Toronto coming alive
in the shared basement rooms
with exorbitant rents,
the other half
of
the day-long song
gets
written in the gleaming malls,
stuffy warehouses and kitchens of
authentic Indian-Asian joints by
mechanical hands and blank eyes.
The evening
archives these common songs
in the sky’s open vaults
for
being rewritten
by
other batches of migrants
for the next dawn
*
Associations
The gentle wind
reminds
the female immigrant
of
a Margo tree
in
the courtyard of a
two-storied home
in Greater Noida, kissed
by
a crimson sun; a tree with stories
and teen secrets
hanging from its boughs
and leaves.
The smell
of the grassy grounds
sweetened
by the summer
rain in Toronto
brings back the smells
of
the soil in the flower-beds
and front garden,
forever enshrined in the mind.
*
La durée
The fall in Ontario
with
its spectacular hues
spread out in every glen
and nook, as an outsized
mural, calls like an old
friend from Karol Bagh, on
a wintry night.
The moment
compresses the competing
time-zones and geographies;
unites the widely-apart views
into
a single landscape of converged
colours.
A simultaneity of two
frames of living.
Does not New Delhi look
the same
in the brilliant summer and
fall?
***
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.
