Yuyursu Sharma 11/13

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.