BIO
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 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. 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.
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There’s a treasure
There’s a treasure
in my warm bed
a velvet touch
of swallows, a scent
of rhododendrons,
two moons and a Sun,
a song of mellowing kisses
I’ve fantasized
in half a century
of my short life
wild canyons
an abode of snow
a sanctuary
of a million shrines
and jubilant gompas
and down below
a delta of rainforests
where icy waters
of life and longevity flow.
*****
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Father
My hairs go aflame
as he hiccups and breathes the last of this earth.
A gray wart appears on my forehead.
I clasp your cold palms
to feel the blackout of your blood vessels.
On your chest, I burst
a silent pitcher of my life’s sleep
Darkness,
a savage silence of Sunya’s eternal ocean.
I glisten your rubbery body
from honey, curd and milk of seven rivers;
a tear keeps rolling endlessly
on the naked wound of my secret grief.
For the last time, I hold
this face of yours in my trembling hands;
a blast of a wail
ravages sunlight of my faith.
On your body, I place
heavy logs damp from a history of vanquished hearts.
In the crack of your still mouth
I drop a grain of a rainbow
and light the last fire
that shall blacken quiet pages of my youth.
I hit the center of your skull
aflame in the spluttering pyre
to ignite a bejeweled passage to eternity.
On the flooded banks of the Ganges
I knead your limbs all over again;
I make your head
heart, hands, life-veins, lines of your fate.
From the mantras of my breaths
I feed the hunger of your blood vessels
and see you go alone
along the blazing fields of Garuda Purana
eating crumbs of the blessed food
lost in the memories of my childhood
when you lifted me
up in the fragrant stretch of the blue hillside air
and probably for the first time
in your life, smiled…
(From Annapurna Poems: Poems Selected and New, 2017)
*****
Gopal Prasad Rimal
A poet pulls a fresh sun
out from the dark, festering uterus of oligarchy
I salute you poet,
I salute.
I salute your motion
of smashing brass-bells of orthodoxy
on the thresholds of history,
of ushering forth a dawn of democracy.
I salute you, poet
I salute your disillusionment
with the wolves of change
and sham suitors of democracy
who wrenched a rib
out from your shattered body
to keep your eyes
off the storms of change,
and make you
romp like a buffoon with
the harlots of anarchy
in the conspiring castle of filth.
I salute your disenchantment
with the stammering fathers of the nation
who left you crippled
and alone to go mad
in the blind streets
of the termite-eaten capital of the fiery dragon.
I salute your madness, poet
I salute.
I salute your total
rejection of a pose of hypocrisy.
Your morbid visits
to the temple of the Mahakaal
to utter a prayer
to light a pagoda of poems.
Your fierce display
of Khukri, waiting to bring another revolution.
Your desire
to donate semen for healthy wombs.
I salute your rise
from the debris of history to tell us ;
A Day Comes
but once in an Age.
(From Some Female Yeti and Other Poems, 2017)
*****
