Hearts for Sale
by Sunil Sharma / February 20th, 2022
The girl-child stands motionless at the
square
tiny hands hold a pole with the red
balloons
that flutter in the damp
air.
The young haggle for these
hearts
that invite the world to be their
valentines.
Happy with the discounts, they go like
winners
at the cost of that small vendor with
innocent eyes.
Then comes Mr. Goodman, your typical
You Tuber
And buys all the remaining hearts for more
subscriptions
praise and ads for his channel
poverty
hunger
child labour
civic apathy
broken dreams
early adulthood
of the vendor
all neatly packaged and sentimentalised
as a sob spectacle
for the voyeuristic eyes of a
media society of the dulled
hearts.
Sunil Sharma is an academic, critic, literary editor and author with 29 published books: Eight collections of poetry; five of short fiction; two novels; a critical study of the novel, and, 10 joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, two joint poetry collection and one joint fiction collection. Recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ Inaugural Poet of the Year award in 2012. Winner, among others, of the Panorama Golden Globe Award-2023, and, Nissim Award for Excellence (2022) for the novel
Minotaur. His poems were published in the UN project
Happiness, The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, (2015).
Read other articles by Sunil, or
visit Sunil's website.
This article was posted on Sunday, February 20th, 2022 at 8:02am and is filed under Poetry.
