Yuyutsu Sharma: Charles Bernstein on Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming, "In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems"

Sunday, March 13, 2022

Charles Bernstein on Yuyutsu Sharma's upcoming, "In God's Messy Workplace: The 2020-21 Poems"

Like “globes of light” along a narrow path through “blind night,” these syncopating couplets offer neither escape nor absolution, but something more tangible for “bleary-eyed wanderers”: company along the way.

—Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry & the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for American Poet

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From Yuyutsu Sharma's "The Lake Fewa & A Horse : Poems New"

Glacier

A hope

that someday I shall sprout

like a tree

on the edge of a remote hillside.

A hope

someday a Queen-of-the-Night

shall bloom in my chest

and suck all the smoke

I have inhaled

in these malignant cities.

A hope that someday

a just born brook shall clean

and wash

bacteria of greed in me.

A hope that someday

a Buddha meditating in the niche of a cairn

by the heap of the city

garbage shall shake his limbs

and walk away towards a village of eternity

to take another birth

to save me

from the shame of becoming a glacier.

River: Morning

Cruel river

knows each time

I come to brood

over her roaring waters

each time I come

to her deafening banks

to gleam my dreams

over the plump flanks of her warm body

each time I come

to pour last of my life’s salt

in the ringing gorges

of her sonorous frame,

a bone breaks

in my smoldering chest

and a wrinkle appears

across the shriveled leaf of my life.

River at Night

Dark night

I cannot see the river.

I can only

hear it thundering rumble.

A water well explodes

enamored in the fleshy

clutch of fluffy

clouds, making a cave of this gorge.

Only fingers of the fireflies

illuminate its shape, the wild limbs,

as the river fumbles

curled around the hefty thighs of the night

to find a wink of sleep.