RICHA SHARMA

 

RICHA SHARMA

 

Inability

 

Do you know of someone, somewhere?

who suffers from an inability to heal?

Such people who breathe in, their sorrow

with every bit of everything they feel

 

Time, an ally sometimes and sometimes it’s not

future as a salve with an incomplete past

with their broken mirrors and pilfered selves

how long will their half-eaten souls last?

 

A quest to seek the spot in the sun

with a crippling inability to shine and light

what else but the embers of long dead grief

poked by their minds, invoked to ignite

 

 

Imposter

 

I feel like I barged into my own life

it’s not mine but someone’s else’s

not my woes, none my strife

delights not mine nor the happinesses

this house belongs not to me

the furniture or the cutlery

the children I love, not from me

nor is this view that I deserve to see

 

Who am I, who does not belong?

From where I come

I’m everything that’s wrong

I wander from reality, from truth I run

I look around and I am lost

like manning a forgotten outpost

I am the guest, not the gracious host

I am the thief that bears this cost

 

Every day of feeling found out

every day of running from a chase

looking over my shoulder and about

a fraud, a con, only a disgrace

I try so hard to belong in here

I don’t fit, it’s more than clear

The lies overwhelm me, I cannot bear

the imposter will vanish when reality appears

 

 

The Business Of Life

 

In my diary I wrote

the words of colours

the colours of aromas

the aromas of feelings

the feelings of thoughts

condensed in the ink

and held by the blots

 

On my canvas I paint

the width of my sky

the sky of my dreams

the dreams of a past

the past of my present

stroked lovingly across

and borne by the wind

 

In my musings I seek

the world actualised

the actual me in reflections

the reflections in the pools

the pools of your eyes

draped with their sight

and dressed in the clouds

 

Such glorious bits I wish to create

but the pen defeats

the brush remains sterile

the mind is enmeshed

in the business of life.

 

 

Bleeding Moonlight

 

When I looked to the nightly nimbus knights

a strange silence fell and dripping echoed

I found hapless and formless

bleeding moonlight on my bed

 

When I stepped up to the moon

the immortal symbolic pathos in the skies

I found a love beaten, lost, and gone

as the bleeding moonlight weeps and sighs

 

There fell the stars in apocalyptic seas

as I murmured words empty again

the gluttonous dawn eating its heart

washing the moonlight’s tragic stain

 

It became a memory of nothing

my wounded, castaway friend

And yet I saw it in this night

along the lunar circumference

 

Such is their marriage I can see

such great their endless, deathly love

a wound, aspersion, injury

not a force to break it apart enough

 

When she comes to visit once in every while

sometimes, my illuminated tenacious light

it seems happy engulfing the hubristic moon

it’s pride, it’s self-centred, circular sight!

 

RICHA SHARMA

 

RICHA SHARMA has lived most of her life in Delhi and Mumbai. She has dabbled in advertising, academic editing, and teaching mass media at university-level. Despite her many commitments, poetry has always been an active pursuit. She currently resides in Singapore with her family of two human children and one fur baby. The vast range and reach of human emotion in its natural interaction with the existential elements is a recurring theme in most of her poetry. She has been writing poetry both in Hindi as well as in English for more than thirty years now. She loves to paint watercolours and sketch meditative mandalas, often related to her poetic themes or vice versa.