Tempered steel
by Sunil Sharma / August 9th, 2026
Exhausted lexicon needs alteration
in
red-hot furnace that burns brighter,
every passing night.
Neo-poetics for deradicalized age
seeking
sensations that never get satisfied.
Transformed by hungry fire, hammers,
muscular
hands forge tunes out of fiery metals
being
relentlessly fashioned to commodities.
Sweat and muscle turn alloys into
objects
consecrated for the hungry markets.
Neo syntax remade to record daily agony,
joy, hope of commuters wading through the
annual floods of Mumbai.
Cautiously negotiating slippery roads of Toronto,
blinded
by the blizzard,
yet
delivering late-evening orders at your
frozen yards on time,
with the warm smile of an immigrant
never complaining about life in an alien
city.
Let these words be their lyrics
they wanted but could not finish!
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, August 9th, 2026 at 8:00am and is filed under Poetry.
