Prageeta Sharma, Onement Won

 

Secular Ornament

Throughout this fallen fall into a diminished winter

with its ten thousand upturned leaves,
its impervious starlight for which I was given sight to look up, Upa,
having perceived the mind,
in an imperceptible 

snowed-in shadow. A demarcated yellow.

I was giving a future to breathe in. 

I am still discussing what traumas won’t shake.

Could they lessen in time? 

Why do you think I am with him because he is at peace with himself
and brings his peace to me. 

There is incalculable value in the quiet night of nonviolent affairs.

The latest poetry title by American poet Prageeta Sharma, her sixth, is Onement Won (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025), a follow-up to her devastating Grief Sequence (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], a collection that wrote on and reacted to the loss of her husband due to cancer. As she wrote: “These are the facts: I lost my husband, composer and artist Dale Edwin Sherrard, on January 14, 2015, after his fight with esophageal cancer. // This is the fact and narrative, my obituary of his dying days, his death days.” This new collection is dedicated to her mother, and to her second husband, the photographer Michael Stussy, both of whom passed in 2023. As the press release for Onement One offers: “Having been twice widowed to cancer, Sharma questions the various relationships—familial, social, romantic, religious—that have shaped her identity.” How does one continue across such a length of grief? Or, as the poem “Metaphorically Challenged” begins: “I meant well and resisted comparisons / for a while because those who might cajole / me into finding their inaccuracy accurate / need likenesses. I was meant to find myself inside a metaphor / but I wasn’t there and felt disillusioned.”

“This is about coming back to oneself. // No Ram Dass. No Be Here Now. // No Om of sitting in place.” she writes, early in Onement One. “This is about size and succumbing.” Across such long and languid sentences that extend the page in sequence, and poems that extend across distances and into each other, Sharma writes through and around grief, and what might follow; what might emerge from such a heft of death and loss and ash. Sharma composes lyric meditations on grief and beyond grief, writing lost friendships and navigating such strange, foreign and familiar territories. “I want to feel more sentient,” she writes, as part of the poem “Sunday, Sunday,” “I say to the blankets and to the neurological / labor I hope to integrate. // I don’t want the ingestible lyric of my body to blindfold me. / I do wonder what David Lynch has learned from the Upanishads.” Given the extensive lyric explorations of her stunning prior collection, as well, how does one follow grief with grief? Or, as the poem “Long-Term Intimacy and Terminal Illness” ends:

Your body is working so hard to endure these days
and my body feels the sad ache of new melancholia 

for what is coming, for what is being taken away by fate,
and what of our hearts that become capacities of secular possession.