Sunil Sharma- A Poem

Graveyards and ghosts

Sometimes history serves as a graveyard for space and time.

One such site is the Tower Green; date inscribed permanently:

May 19, 1536.

The Tower of London is exotic for the tourists searching for fun, history

They get told of urban legends and nocturnal visit/s of a royal lady

A queen walking the green, head clutching, a spectral figure clad in

White, reclaiming a place that was denied by a man with six wives.

Looking into past needs special eyes

Eyes that are probing

And can penetrate the mists of time.

To meet the dignified ghost famous in UK and the world

On certain occasions, you have to see from a clear eye.

Anne Boleyn, every May 19, comes headless in a carriage

With headless horses and coachman and roams freely the

Blickling Hall, Norfolk, till sunrise.

A queen murdered wants justice from a system that treats

Females as chickens to be butchered any time!

The royal woman is reduced to a subaltern buried in a Tudor household

And resurfaces on the day of her heartless execution in a feudal age

That still continues, although hidden, in a post-modern age, where Henry VIII

Rules in a Seville Row silk-suits, a cigar dangling.

Ghosts!

Hamlet senior.

Anne Boleyn.

Till systems get overhauled, you are bound to sight the Undead on the lonely turrets and corridors and grounds.

Mumbai-based, Sunil Sharma is  a widely-published Indian writer. He has already published  14 books: four collections of poetry, two of short fiction, one novel, one a critical study of the novel and co-edited six anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. Recently his poems were published in the UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree.