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 Toronto-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 23 published books: Seven collections of poetry; four of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, nine joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award---2012. His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015. Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal
Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA. For more details, please visit
here 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.
