Country lane

By Sunil Sharma

 

The lane nestles among the trees
like a huge python, winding round and round
on this late-February morning
with a hint of approaching spring.

The rude hamlet, one of many, dots
the highway that connects it with
the distant Mumbai.
The narrow road glistens in the
lazy sun-light sprawled on the
meadows like an agitated sheet with the green-orange patterns.

The road, black and slithering
like the python, in the eyes of a girl-child
with a head load of dry branches
and twigs for the earthen stove in
the joint- family kitchen.

 

The hills and a shrine

The hills, outside the booming suburbs,
Mumbai and elsewhere
Stand denuded, scarred, brown.

 

A dirt track
Like a huge python, winding round and round
Around their stony girth

 

Leads to a lone shrine on top of one
Of the rugged summits,
The middle one, amid few surviving trees

 

That provide shade, a holy place that has stopped the excavators
From plundering the once-vibrant woodland
Now fragile, stripped and ugly;

 

The old shrine beckons the faithful daily
And where few pedestrians trek to offer fresh
Flowers and incense sticks to the deity carved out
Of a rugged granite and daubed with vermilion.

 

 

Sunil Sharma, a senior academic and author-critic-poet--freelance journalist, is from suburban Mumbai, India. He has published 21 books so far, some solo and some joint, on prose, poetry and criticism. He edits the monthly, bilingual Setu