In the local tea shop,
my regular haunt
to write fresh poems
each morning in Kathmandu,
I pull a page
out of my sheaf of papers
to let her read what I’ve been
working on since morning.
She looks at it for a second,
then almost uninterested
as if she has made a mistake
twitches her nose
twisting her face eerily
lifts it as a blade against her cheeks
turning the page
with my Corona poem
as a protection wall
to sneeze behind and return
the sullied page
as a fitting token of appreciation
from some cranky critic.
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 Ram Dass Sharma is a world renowned Himalayan poet and translator.
He has published ten poetry collections including, Second Buddha Walk, Annapurna Poems, and A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems. Widely traveled author, he has read his works at several prestigious places and held workshops in creative writing and translation at Heidelberg University, Germany, California, Beijing Open University and New York University, New York..
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.
yuyutsurd@gmail.com