Three Poems – including “The Sun and the Chimney Sweeper” – by Dr. Ranjana Sharan Sinha

“Love’s language starts, stops, starts;
the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.”
Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture

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It is a delight to feature Ranjana’s poetry once again. Enjoy! / J.D.

The view from my balcony:

A sun-splashed morning–

The incandescent ball

splits up into a pair of golden wings–

Time trembles like a butterfly

in a state of delicious langour:

I feel the flutter in the

cradle of imagination!

No view under the city flyover–

Home of the homeless–

The migrant construction workers!

The golden gleams can’t turn

the drudgery into happiness.

The daybreak becomes

a maddening tedium–

An endless treadmill of

running, panting, and

counting down seconds!

Uprooted from their native place,

vulnerable to discrimination;

under constant hazards of

falls, machine-injuries, and

amputations, they remain!

The sun can’t better and brighten

their monolithic nothingness:

Poverty, quite often,

gives birth to many

CHIMNEY SWEEPERS

deprived of sunshine and light

dreaming of black coffins!

Godavari in the arms of evening,

        The hush of descending hours;

A hazy surreal beauty in the making

        Beyond the human Powers!

The horizon sun a big red zircon

        Suspended with a chain of gold,

Like pendant hangs on her bosom–

        Reflections on the ripples’ fold.

Cool and innocuous the river flows

        Alive in an endless panoply

Of agony and ecstasy, joy and sorrow,

        Thinning the line between real and fantasy.

She carries immortal mysteries of mortals

        Sometimes frozen, sometimes moving,

Ashes of the deceased, the devotee’s flowers,

        Abode of psyches dead and living.

Fossils of unanswered thoughts in depths unknown,

        Curiously appear on the surface terrain;

I look at Godavari and find the answers

        And feel the waters in my vein!

Rimjhim rain

falls like whispers

from the wet sky

Mists and clouds

Receding moonlight

Coolness of night

fascinating and poetic

The soft susurration

a toast of love

Cheers! Slainte! Kampai!

Clinking  of goblets

transparent and crystalline

Bronze and russet sunlight

held within by water

The colour wraps itself

around my fluttering heart

and seeps into my veins

The metaphor of rain

hurts and heals

Quaint contradictions!

A professor by profession and a poet by passion, Dr. Ranjana Sharan Sinha has received many awards for her contribution to literature. Accolade from the former President of India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for her poem Mother Nature. She is an eminent poet, author, and a critic. Her poems, short stories and research papers have been widely published in highly acclaimed dailies, magazines, e-zines, journals and archives at national and international levels. Authored and Published 07 books in different genres and 50 research papers covering different themes. Poems published in more than 15 prestigious international anthologies and archives. Research Supervisor, RTM Nagpur University, Nagpur (India).

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ABOUT

A busy though bed-bound poet, writer, former columnist and the former associate editor of a regional employment newspaper, my work has been featured widely in print and digital publications including: Levure littéraire, Ramingo’s Porch, Vita Brevis Literature, HerStry, Connotation Press, The Bar None Group, Salamander Cove, I Am Not a Silent Poet, Meta/ Phor(e) /Play, Woven Tale Press, The Compass Rose and California Woman. Among others,  I’ve been featured on The MethoBlog, on the Plumb Tree’s Wednesday Poet’s Corner, and several times as Second Light Live featured poet.