Traits and talents together take turns
To woo each other to discover in time,
What space they shared in their minds,
Not age but what they felt was relevant.
Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma, a renowned poet from Himachal Pradesh, India shares poems.
Hailing from Himachal Pradesh, India, Dr. Lalit Mohan Sharma, born in 1952, has published ten books of English poetry which include ‘Man with A Horn’, ‘Eyes of Silence’ and ‘There’s No Death’. His book, A Three- Step Journey, is English translation of Zahid’s Urdu poems. ‘Icicles of Time’ is the latest in 2024. Sharma was conferred with ‘Master of Creative Impulse’ at World Poetry Conference in 2019. A former Principal, Government College, Dharamshala, he has been anthologized in several books of poetry, stories and such books of academic interest as 21st Century Critical Thought: A Dialogue with Post-Modern Voices Vol I, (2020), A Handbook of Contemporary Ethics, (2024), Ed by Molly Joseph and JS Anand
An Impossible Story
A man in his late sixties is won over
By a woman in her late twenties and
It’s not infatuation nor just an obsession,
But a budding bond of evolved affections.
Traits and talents together take turns
To woo each other to discover in time,
What space they shared in their minds,
Not age but what they felt was relevant.
Be always young, so too in old age was
What his writing thrived on and poetry
In the way she looked, read the books,
Everything conspired to rouse passions.
She saw verses in tales her grandma told,
Her growing years lost not the sight of
Her childhood love, she told daddy friend
Of her hungry self and appetizing tastes.
The two connected by a Nietzsche link,
Accept not what has just been offered,
To revalue all values as a cardinal faith,
Their intellects shared a common instinct
She shared in photos her varying moods,
Her poems, stories and how she liked
Her wedding dress, her foot in an anklet,
How she loved words of her dear friend.
Poetry as if moves to the back- burner as
Her creative zeal tends after her daughter,
Her spouse and job use all her time while
Her mails aren’t as frequent to her friend.
***
Recreate!
No subject is too mean or terribly exalted
For a poem short or long to recreate itself
No melodrama or absence of sentiment
Can injure an emotion by loading weight
Of unarmed feelings and terse thoughts.
Sit beside a poem for a minute or an hour
And if such a luxury turns into a necessity
Art consummates a deep human longing
Poems whisper and stories do the talking
Man riding a metro or stretched in a chair
Inhabits the world his imagination travels
Beats a reader’s mind to see Rilke writing
Or Dostoevsky ponders over our mankind
***
Observe
Observe without evaluation
Advised a wise philosopher
Isn’t observation too laced
With tones of perception?
What I see and what I look at
The difference is dyed in value
As aesthetics grasp beautiful
Logic of pleasure guides us
We can’t see the good bleed
Nor can let the better suffer
To be is to evaluate and
Review the values again.
___________________
Read: Shoeless in Noakhali – Poetic Homage to Gandhi
