These Waters We Remember

Vivek Sharma

Pimbahal Pond in late autumn light: few fish drift across its surface. Your voice lingers, a steady
hum of someone reading a book in a language I don’t understand. We sit without speaking. A
jacaranda frond shakes in the wind, its cloying perfume drifting across the Kathmandu hills,
something stirs: shadows of lives we have lost and keep on losing, this year of the mad virus.
Isn’t this beautiful? you ask, words from a distant café where my life smolders in a cold ashtray,
the cup waits gloomily for a refill. Sparrows chirping from alleyways. Rain begins, light at first,
then steady. Pimbahal glints again: a shimmer of wings, this damp earth, more minnows slipping
through & through.

autumn pond—
where have you, my blue
mimosa, gone?

Vivek Sharma writes at the meeting place of mountains and lakes, of memory and forgetting. A graduate of UBC’s MFA program, his poems have appeared in Arc Poetry, The Best Canadian Poetry 2026, The Capilano Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and The Walrus. His chapbook, Between two valleys, a lake (Anstruther Press, 2025), is an exploration of displacement and return, of what it means to be an inhabitant of dual places, dual cultures. He lives and writes on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan peoples.