Vasant (Spring) 2020 Poems - Sunil Sharma
Country lane
By Sunil Sharma
The lane nestles among the trees
like a huge python, winding round and round
on this late-February morning
with a hint of approaching spring.
The rude hamlet, one of many, dots
the highway that connects it with
the distant Mumbai.
The narrow road glistens in the
lazy sun-light sprawled on the
meadows like an agitated sheet with the green-orange patterns.
The road, black and slithering
like the python, in the eyes of a girl-child
with a head load of dry branches
and twigs for the earthen stove in
the joint- family kitchen.
The hills and a shrine
The hills, outside the booming suburbs,
Mumbai and elsewhere
Stand denuded, scarred, brown.
A dirt track
Like a huge python, winding round and round
Around their stony girth
Leads to a lone shrine on top of one
Of the rugged summits,
The middle one, amid few surviving trees
That provide shade, a holy place that has stopped the excavators
From plundering the once-vibrant woodland
Now fragile, stripped and ugly;
The old shrine beckons the faithful daily
And where few pedestrians trek to offer fresh
Flowers and incense sticks to the deity carved out
Of a rugged granite and daubed with vermilion.
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Sunil Sharma, a senior academic and author-critic-poet--freelance journalist, is from suburban Mumbai, India. He has published 21 books so far, some solo and some joint, on prose, poetry and criticism. He edits the monthly, bilingual Setu
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