11/13/2017 Yuyutsu Sharma hosted by Jim
(Need a prompt? How do you explain your position on the planet? -- you don't have to use those words.)
Yuyutsu R D Sharma has published nine poetry collections including, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems (Nirala, 2016). He has translated Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh and Hebrew poet Ronny Someck into Nepali. Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma is his most recent publication. Yuyutsu’s work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. Yuyutsu is the Visiting Poet at Columbia University, New York and has just returned from China where he had gone to read at Beijing International Book Fair.
Mules by Yuyutsu Sharma
On the great Tibetan
salt route they meet me again
old forsaken friends ...
On their faces
fatigue of a drunken sleep
their lives worn out,
their legs twisted, shaking
from carrying
illustrious flags of bleeding ascents.
Age long bells clinging
to them like festering wounds
beating notes
of a slavery modernism brings:
cartons of Iceberg, mineral water bottles,
solar heaters, Chinese tiles, tin cans, carom boards
sacks of rice
and iodized salt from the plains of Nepal Terai.
Butterflies of
the terraced fields know their names.
Singing brooks tempests
of their breathless climbs.
Traffic alert
and time-tested, they climb
carrying
dreams of posh peacocks
pamphlets
of a secret religious war
filth
of an ecologist's sterile semen
entire kitchen
for a cocktail party at the base camp
defunct development
agenda of guilty donors
the West's weird visions
lusting for an instant purge.
Stone steps
of the mountains embossed
on their drugged brains,
like lines of aborted love
scratched
on the historic rocks of waterspouts.
Starry skies
of the dozing valleys know
the ache
of their secret sweat.
Sunny days
along the crystal rivers
taste
of their bleeding eyes.
Greatest fiction
of the struggling lives lost,
like real mules
clattering their hooves on the flagstones,
in circling
the cruel grandeur
of blood thirsty
mule paths around the glaciers of Annapurnas.
