SUNIL SHARMA

SUNIL SHARMA

PERSEUS WITH THE HEAD OF MEDUSA

He stands there in a famous section of hoary Florence

Same attitude cast in bronze

From the year 1545 onward.

A  great hero in a pose triumphal

Riding the prostrate body of a slain woman

Her head held in a raised hand like a bleeding trophy.

Medusa described variously as handsome, fair or ugly.

Once ravished by a lecherous Poseidon and then cursed into a figure ghastly.

Wearing serpents as hair-do, hideous, eyes blazing, stern of aspect

The lower side of a Western binary!

Turning the viewer/s into instant stones

Medusa inspires utter terror in the spectators

Across the intervening centuries.

Cellini, the artist, catches a moment celebratory

When male-order vanquishes an unjustly-treated fair maiden/monster

And broadcasts the despicable feat as heroic to the Enlightenment era, bidding bye to the preceding ages barbaric!

Rise, rise, O, Medusa!

Rage against this colonialism of mind/body.

Reverse the scene, gorgon with might powers

Take revenge for your humiliation!

And stand with feet planted on the slayer’s prostrate body!

THE TRANSFIGURED MUSE

Calliope---

From being a Grecian deity of epic poetry

To the one transiting to the digital age,

The beautiful-voiced Muse

In her latest avatar in the post-industrial age

As someone bald, lean-faced and cold

Marked with taut blue veins and eyes blank

Hybrid, a cross guided by artificial intelligence.

List of the random words, like binary matrix calculation,

Splashed across the android visage that is reminiscent

Of a pharaoh’s death- mask stored in a secret funereal chamber dark.

Calliope: Once you inspired Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Ovid, Dante and others

A full figure wearing a gold crown and carrying a roll of paper,

Modeled mostly after the ladies of the nobility of Athens or Rome

By the likes of Simon Vouet and Robert Fagan, among others

Across the varied and changing culturalscapes of thousands of years,

Finally being re-visualized by Rob as a Muse for the denizens of cyber-world

Orbiting as mere atoms in a de-humanized space,

And thus witnessed and attested by an inner eye,

This transfiguration of a minor goddess into a digital avatar is complete,

Nearly ecstatic for the netizens.

GO BACK!

Immigrants

Go back!

A political banner screams in Rome of May, 2015.

All our ills--- due to the evil called migrants!

A street graffiti in Paris. Same year.

In the winter of the same year, European borders open up

Bit tentatively.

The bedraggled Syrians and Iraqis and Turks pouring in, fleeing from their hells.

Then, the bomb attacks.

Paris

Brussels.

Borders closing in the winter/early summer.

Migrants---you are not welcome!

How political systems play havoc with homeless, borderless!

Meanwhile the Siberian cranes migrate across the earth, without being checked!

SUNIL SHARMA

SUNIL SHARMA is a senior academic and a widely-published writer from Mumbai, India. He has already published 15 books: five collections of poetry, two of short fiction, one novel; a critical study of the novel and six joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism. 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. Country: India Mother language: Hindi Nationality: Indian. Place of living: Mumbai. Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA:http://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html For more details, please visit the blog: http://www.drsunilsharma.blogspot.in/