Scorching bon fires

by Sunil Sharma

This summer is unlike any other. It burns hole in the Mind and heart—and scalds the tiny veins of skin. There is death in the air and smoke hangs heavy. The dead are piled up in sheets, waiting—while the undead walk the deserted streets, benumbed; streets under curfew, joy gone out of lives. Wailings of the sirens of the ambulance or cop-cars, unsettling, while the birds fly off in the coppery vault, taunting; the sun is angry!

The spectacle is on, as usual, grim, grimmer!
TV blares the predetermined lines of sterile arguments 

and rackets, while the hospitals and homes gasp, in quarantined
gated communities, across the geographies.
Like a noir film, the shadows whisper, in semi-lit
alleys, with dead ends, ruins.
And, the dead, memory-keepers claim,
will sure rise up together soon,
like an army of leaping specters, hungry
—as Rome did/ does; A Rome when Nero watched, and it burnt down, in scorching fires that have left a long trail in history; a trail that cannot be erased—
for answers from the living!

Sunil Sharma is a Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 22 published books: Seven collections of poetry; three of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, nine 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 the year 2015.