Corina Poem 3: The Supermarket, Elmhurst by Yuyutsu Sharma

“Do you sell any wines here,”

I asked and  waited there for an eternity
as he struggled unpacking his box
of 99 cent merchandise in the aisle,
then rose to face me,
“I speak no Englis.”
I walked the superstore,
stench of the dead and the dying
stinging my nostrils...
A stone crab menacing moving
its smashed pincers atop
a pile of soft shelled turtles
frozen and defaced from
uncouth handling and numerous inspections--
Tilapia, carp and caby fish,
Dungeness crab and special lobsters,
jelly fish, yellow eel, the snake of the sea,
all live and squirming
in the murky waters of my brain...
The striped bass whose face
has been scrubbed along
endless tracks of transportations,
buffalo carp moving in
a murky glass case,
or live frogs in a tin box,
inert, not croaking to bring
Dionysus to these golden
Superstores in the Queens.
Great China crab frozen
beneath layers of an affluence,
conch shells hushed before the snail
could wriggle out of the shell
and name million cosmic metaphors
of self, salvation and sacrifice.
Or leave the empty body
of the Lord to utter a prayer
or a war cry of justice...
I guess it was a revolution
of sparrows as he lifted his step
to stop in the middle
of the jungle on his way out
of the castle Kapilvastu
and carefully step aside
so as not to crush
a line of Industrious ants
or stop a summer song
of ecstatic cicadas
along the raging rivers...

I haste I rushed out
of the slaughter house,
feeling the dragon’s hook
in my throat and bowed to
million little lives on the earth
singing and swaying in an erratic energy
to the music of His long
lustrous earlobes of wisdom...

©Yuyutsu Sharma (yuyutsurd@gmail.com)

From A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Nirala, 2017

Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma is a world renowned Himalayan poet and translator.

 He has published ten poetry collections including, The Second Buddha Walk, A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems, Quaking Cantos: Nepal Earthquake Poems, Nepal Trilogy, Space Cake, Amsterdam and Annapurna Poems. Three books of his poetry, Poemes de l’ Himalayas (L’Harmattan, Paris), Poemas de Los Himalayas (Cosmopoeticia, Cordoba, Spain) and Jezero Fewa & Konj (Sodobnost International) have appeared in French,  Spanish and Slovenian respectively.  In addition, Eternal Snow: A Worldwide Anthology of One Hundred Twenty-Five Poetic Intersections with Himalayan Poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma has just appeared.

He has held workshops in creative writing and translation at Queen's University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany, University of California, Davis, Sacramento State University, California, Beijing Open University and New York University, New York.

Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world and conducts Creative Writing workshops at various universities in North America and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home. Currently,

Yuyutsu Sharma is a visiting poet at Columbia University and edits, Pratik: A Quarterly Magazine of Contemporary Writing.