“You have to read him out aloud.
And if you can, do learn the lines.”
That’s all she ever asked of me
When I implored her to divine
The genius of Shakespeare.
I tossed it as clichéd advice.
I could not make the meanest sense
Of how his words enmeshed with life.
So, why attempt, in staged pretense,
The genius of Shakespeare?
It’s only after sixteen years,
As I recover sanity,
That as a liberated fool,
I strut to voice, with vanity,
The genius of Shakespeare.
His origami language,
His curdling cud of metaphors,
Incarnate on my conscious tongue,
Through music of his metered verse,
The genius of Shakespeare.
No limitation unstruggled,
No beauty undemonstrated,
No role in life has yet escaped –
Not even pauses, unstated –
The genius of Shakespeare.
So, when my mind is fuddled now,
When music suffocates my ears,
When shayari of Sufis fails,
I summon for my torment fierce
The genius of Shakespeare.
Minakhi Misra 