Poetry by Seshendra Sharma
age: 76    Location: ap/India
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My Country My people modern Indian epic


Once before the jaws of monstrous cities
Swallowed me
I used to relax my limbs on the golden sands of seaside beaches.
And stretch my gaze beyond the restless
Waves of the blue sea.
I used to bathe in the vague sweetness of fancying the objects and lands,
beyond the limits of my visual experience?
is it Rangoon, or Singapore, or Bangkok,
or that large chunk of water, that liquid sapphire, the Pacific,
which is my blue dream flying
In the sky, fallen to the ground, having lost its wings, somewhere suddenly.
Seas are punctuations in the sentence of earth
          The running civilizations breath rest a while
When commas, colons, and hyphens interfere in their travels.
They are then introduced to the lands of new shores,
with fresh looks and In fresh garments.
          Seas are pots of ink, which the earth uses
To write her romances.
          Empires, civilizations, scents of knowledge
Are scribblings, which the winds carry from the seas.
Those ancient winds, light the cities, rule the countries.
          And , it is the same ink with which the epics
Of man are written. Time swallows the poems
Written by man, for the health of man.
          I ate old poems now, and vomited their
Undigested limbs. Now
My hunger is for the new word.
I knit poems now with the void
Thundering beyond my eyes,
With the blue whispering beyond my seas
With the heights soaring beyond my stars:
With depths in me which my hand
Cannot reach,
With al the material which my
Contemporaries are not familiar with-
Beyond the cities in which I remain
Undigested:
Beyond the forests where my soul hatches
Her yearnings,
Beyond that circular line which binds all
Created things and only the one arc of which is
Visible to human eyes,
And beyond which my third eye, craves to burst:
There waiting for me
My blue, blue sea, lying in wait
For centuries on end..

©Seshendra Sharma

Rivers and Poets

Rivers and poets
Are veins and arteries
Of a country.
Rivers flow like poems
For animals for birds
And for human beings-
The dreams that rivers dream
Bear fruit in the fields
The dreams that poets dream
Bear fruit in the people-
*********
The sunshine of my thought fell on the word
And its long shadow fell upon the century
Sun was playing with the early morning flowers
Time was frightened at the sight of the martyr-


©Seshendra Sharma