Sunil Sharma- A Poem

Cultural transmutation: Will Shakespeare---400

There comes a time when you become

A Lear

Hamlet

Macbeth

in your life

sometimes one by one

sometimes all rolled into one

and, sometimes, in piecemeal.

You are, that moment, a Will Shakespeare

Will becoming you

the creator, created and the recipient---isomers of artistic universe.

You inhabit a temporal paradox

a dualism of time...here

making and unmaking of moments

real and lapsed collapsing in the same moment

Simultaneously posited in 1564-1616 and 2016

Flitting between an English Court and postmodern Mumbai/Madrid.

How time is caught, preserved, anesthetized---and revived!

In your current finger tips you hold bits of brittle time

faded lost buried in a tomb or tome in a library

an era gone forever but retrieved and re-incarnated

between a text and your eyes!

Will Shakespeare defies time

an encyclopedia is shown in his lines and songs

the full nature of human beings revealed on/off the stage

folios and films.

In dear William Shakespeare, each finds a bit of themselves

neatly labeled, documented and analyzed

Being- Becoming

A Hamlet

and other dramatic personae

at varied times by donning their robes and lines.

sediments of ages…lie inside the plays and sonnets

for us to find.

There, yet not there, yet there-not here

here-there, there-here, living two realms of space-time

turning into

a fool

a grave digger

Or

a babbling Lear finding clarity and sanity

in moments of insanity!