Yuyutsu Sharma - On an empty sac street

Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu Sharma is a world renowned Himalayan poet and translator. He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas, Poemas de Los Himalayas and Jezero Fewa & Konj have appeared in French, Spanish and Slovenian respectively. Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home. Currently, Yuyutsu Sharma is a visiting poet at Columbia University and edits, Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.

Jasmine Jewels

Inspired by Julie Williams Krishnan’s photograph

Translucent sparks of compassion,

quiet, impenetrable feathers of light,

only fools would attempt to smash

their indestructible cores with sledge hammers.

The white jasmine jewels have traveled

centuries of soft sleep to arrive here

and nestle like little lambs between human and divine feet,

tousled, nameless face of the animal vehicle

beside the frozen feet, the only clue to the deserts of darkness

they tried to plough through to overcome the demon that rode

a wolf’s back to drink up raging oceans of humanity,

Only the quietly menstruating jasmine flowers survived in the end

to sum up our story.

On an Empty Sac Street

Sacramento, Ca For Penny Kline

On a lonely summer afternoon everyone seems indoors.

The Sun baking the white ferries wavering on the sluices of the Delta shines, bleached bones of my own ancestors I picked up years ago from the cremation ghats back home.

On the Delta King the waitress of blue eyes endlessly taking ‘selfies’ has forgotten to bring milk for my Organic Indian tea.

A man in shorts only running up and down the cobbled streets has crusts of dirt on his bare body.

First time I came to the city Rachael spoke of the night she slept with a visiting poet from Chicago on this every riverboat that rocked that night from tumultuous winds.

Would these rail bogies with SANTA FE painted in glazed white letters ever leave The Pony Express Depot for its ultimate Station?

The underpass you directed me to was so scary, I took my saffron scarf off, folded it carefully and placed it in the loneliest sections of my black bag.

They hung out there and frolicked in hordes along the dignified portraits of the Colonists, Capitalists, masterminds of the Gold Rush and feral fires of the Chinese captivities.

A young woman on the First Street, folds of her fluffy white belly drooling over her tattered leather belt, must have been a secretary a treasurer’s concubine or a teacher with a gigantic guilt before she opted out to count stars in the shattered hourglass.

Her cartload of miseries, canned food, toilet paper rolls, cartels of beer hiding the purple circles of her nocturnal abuse.

Did I sleep with her moved my hand over her private fish, once, perhaps in another life as she took me out to a short safari on a boat across the Delta of gold where Champaign air flowed in over the confluence of the sacred waters mingling blood and body of the Lord Almighty?

But today everyone seems indoors except for a lonely Chávez statue in a glassy square under renovation and a homeless hunger sliding into a sleep on an empty Sac street.

What feeds the furnace?

for Marcia Niccoli Kiernan

What feeds the furnace of my mind,

driving the demons on a damp day away, a conical kettle bubbling on an ancient stove,

ready to whistle away any moment as you unmake your bed, fold sheets,

the wooden floor crackling underfoot your kind host sleeping away into late lethargic mornings

not just a Park Slope pavement a fire truck cracking the silence of a million eons,

screaming its way through a quiet Sunday silence of the 7th Avenue,

a half-burnt toddler crawling through the hallway,

a sole maple leaf serrated, magenta, autumnal

on the white strips of a rain-washed zebra crossing

a deadly ambush in the scuffling eye with the hound of my boyhood

even on a dusty Himalayan street as you walk teary-eyed and

someone you love hands you a prize soaked in an acid of insults

what guides your shaking hands across scrawny page of your late mother’s wrinkled face

banishing the ghosts of gloom away?

Independence Day, Gorakhpur, 2017

For Shreejana

Frail details of a forgotten dream flood the fields of my sleep into a river of surly smiles; she is pregnant, glowing like a goddess, sitting near me in a scarlet satin saree, her belly ripe, her face flustered her eyes, two blackbirds gawking at me non-stop, an enigma of alpine winds.

In one of newly built Hi-rise buildings in the capital’s suburbs someone hands over a gift to me -- a white elephant on a silver tray, a basket full of flutes, a conch shell to cry out national victories, a huge book, larger than our lives, leather bound, crisp like currency notes, its pages iridescent leaves from a garden of Paradise, a peacock’s feature ablaze in a mid-day Sun’s retina.

A hoopoe breaks open into a sudden flight, crackling, a saga of stifled sentences as I crack open its fat belly. Can I take it home and start reading it like faces of my children?

We wait for a while for a just bought Landrover truck of our affluence to arrive and take us along with the Book newly perched atop my lap, like a just born baby.

I stand up when the national anthem comes up the television right after his speech from the Red Fort; she keeps stroking my chest as I rise and stand in reverence to the invisible flag, my million childhoods racing before my eyes, and finally, entangles herself around me.

In my hometown my grandpa in shining white turban brings home a free box of sweets from the municipality parade in the centre square

I open the box to see dead bodies of just born babies lined up, huddled like wrinkled marigolds in it.