Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Sandeep Kumar Mishra's accolades include the "Vedvyas Award-2022", “Poiesis Award-2022”, "Readers Favorite Award-21", "Indian Achievers Award-21", “IPR Poetry Award-2020” and “Literary Titan Book Award-2020”." among others.

His work has been shortlisted for prestigious awards such as “The Next Generation Story Award-2024”, "Plough Poetry Prize-2024", Short Story Unlimited-2024", "2023 Commonwealth Story Prize," "2021 International Book Awards," and "52nd New Millennium Award-2021,"MPT Story Award-2022' and 'Newcastle Story Award-2022" and "Anasi Story Award-2022" and "Independent Press Award-2022" and "IAN Book Award 2022"

More information- https://www.sandeepkumarmishra.com

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A Visit to Hospital

Hospitals are ideogram of truth where death

has no false tint of life but pukka pain, pink anguish

and some stained hopes. Here white walls soon desert

their fresh petroleum essence to adopt new

aroma of medicines, syrups, dettols and antiseptics

with some of the odourless bones and meat overnight.

These patients have the patience of the old Spartan

school because the man is greater than his pain.

When you hold one of their hand, you feel like your

house keys in your fist. If you hug them their

ribs make a room for your fleshy abdomen while you

sense the titanic waterfall of their hearts slowly sinking.

Avoid any mirror or self reflection coming here, You won't see the things you usually see outside,

Your purged soul will peep out of body fabric like

the sun light coming out of a barred window.

It will be hard to balance petty yourself as inner

burden will be more than the body weight,

but remember, here no heart is by-passed by love.

So let us praise these insomniac beds!

Let us praise the fans that do not adjust!

Praise the room service that doesn’t exist!

And praise the hospital staff wearing masks of joy.

They find expired lungs and tired hearts lying

in their paths every day. While playing poker

with their lives in this game with virus and ailments, they foster death for other passive parties too.

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Birth

The tabooed essence of primordial birth

unfolds in the labyrinth of the unknown,

as if a symphony of blood cells dancing

in the sacred space of  human fabrication.

Where time bends and breathes only

in the rhythm of divine existence,

a fragile vessel of flesh and bone  moves

the soul bound by the thin thread of mortality

On the sharp axis of the four walls,

the earth rotates in the waves of pain,

the alternating current of moisture and drought,

causing the bud to blossom and eventually drop.

With listening the calm symphony of agony,

she seeks solace in the strength of his presence,

because the gestation of time's elusive grasp,

conceals the enigma of life's first cry.

Her bony spiral patterns now facing

the vast expanse of the universe,

now she will take rest alongside all

the mushrooms that have gathered at her door.

Each heartbeat a cadence of grace,

a sonnet whispered by the universe's mouth,

but when I look at your open palms

I don’t find a single line like her hands have.

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Immigration

As I lay my impregnable longing against room's wall,

I hear my helplessness like weeping at dawn,

As my soul wrinkles with the motherland,

I parted with my soul in the country of skin.

No one leaves home unless your home

is a floating nest on the river Nile of industrial waste,

You find yourself among the mining crocs or drought alligators,

When you swim across the seven seas of population

You have a shadow of blood in your veins but an empty

belly and the anthem under your breath.

I carry black scars from wars of white greed,

dust of my family carbonized in dry mushroom clouds,

I carry parental house along the vertebra, pink dreams in my eyes

the miles travelled means something more than a journey.

When the night liquidates the day as a sinful cloud

plasters its sun, everything seems shiny for me-

The shine of stones in my kidneys, two shiny pearls on the cheeks The word “motherland” over the galaxy of stars

and the Moon behind the clouds called “migration.”

I don't know if I am a citizen or not?

For my country, I was a weed of seasonal crop

for this nation, a rudiment by a migratory trade river and thus

left open in the “unwaged sun” and the “taxed rain”.

The country welcomes hundreds of hirsute refugees who can't think

free of faith’s manacles, but not those who believe without

the obligation of forming belief and possess souls of wisdom and skills

with closed eyes to what is happening in Germany and UK.

l am in this country but live in the Sahara or floating on the Dead Sea I’ve transcribed all my dreams into poems, not into realities that

reconcile my exile from home with streets punctuated with electric poles.

I have imagined myself surviving by transforming flowers into the bread I have never eaten, I am a brown floret spring out of your mind

from the womb of a black history birthed from white memory

This is how it feels to live and move in two worlds. At once.

I came here to outlive the ghosts of martyrs

But I am marginalized to the point of disappearance Barred as a shade of skin, a tone of speech, Now I know humanity is Janus faced- White faced black truth I will not recommend it even to political foes or religious friends.

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