Poem: The other side calling
By Sunil Sharma
Always, there is the other side of
every phenomenon, to be discovered. Provided you are ready to enter and
tumble down the long tunnel called
a rabbit’s hole; somebody curious and curioser, by the way, is only qualified there, behind the hedges and a country strange!
All it takes is a willing transition from physical state to
another dimension,
different plane.
As the bard says:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
The question that might be asked by a Prufrock is: But what kind should dream them? Alice or Hamlet?
Ever drifting down the stream –
Lingering in the golden gleam –
Life, what is it but a dream?
Or:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Standing in the field,
flooded by the rains
under a dark sky with clouds pregnant,
I look ahead and see
Wordsworth standing
Among the recently-planted rice saplings
(Odd! But this is year 2018.)
the great romantic wears a plastic cap,
he looks back at the same instant at me
with a broad grin!
On clear nights, I look at the starry
skies and
find things that mesmerized a Van Gogh more than
A century earlier.
Still, things are same but we refuse to see
their beauty and charm – all spread out like a rainbow in the puddles and vaults, heavenly;
Truth is never monolithic but
pluralistic in tone
in order to have a sense of the totality,
we must tumble down a rabbit’s hole or
enter a Looking-glass room on our own
‘cause there is always that side calling out
an adventurer to explore!
Bio:
Sunil Sharma is Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor, and author with 19 published books: Six collections of poetry; two of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. 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 2015. Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal, Setu, published from Pittsburgh, USA. For more details, please visit his blog.
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One Response to “Poem: The other side calling”
Even before I moved beyond the first paragraph to grasp your obvious influences and references, I thought this poem felt like what Lewis Carroll’s headspace would have been while writing the Alice In Wonderland series. Your poem delighted me, pitched conscious and unconscious worlds galore.