KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
Sunil Sharma
Corona and Companionship
Devastated. Contained. Tiny home---a fortress.
An inmate confined within the walls!
The man, bored, watches the road from his Mumbai apartment in the morning;
reads poetry online; watches movies on the TV, then dozes off, to the tunes of a
guitar being played by
his teenage daughter, post-lunch; sits in the narrow balcony full of old papers,
notebooks and discarded items, and, few potted plants to give a semblance of
greenery, in that concrete monstrosity,
and a furry companion drops in silently!
The cat that sprang out of a Murakami novel and refuses to vacate the middle-class
household, always following him and kids, like a lost friend, reunited. He has
begun liking the cat, often curled up at his feet, and this Camus- quote pops up
magically, as a Karmic message for the taciturn manager to feel and be stirred:
…all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
Crows, Fear and Nature
Everywhere this morning,
the black visitors
from the heavens
roost
in large numbers
circle
dive
on the bare streets
the murder of the crows
evokes dark fears
in the hearts of the locked-in citizens:
Why so many?
What kind of omen?
The crows continue to soar, descend,
drop, rise up
A bunch of feathery kids---enjoying the silent streets, playing.
Sunil Sharma is a Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 22 published books: Seven collections of poetry; three of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015.
Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA:
https://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html
For more details, please visit the link: