Behind the Pen: “A Question for Sunrise”

In her piece “A Question for Sunrise,” Anushka Sharma (16), approaches the summer’s sunset theme from a philosophically analytical angle.

During a sixteen-hour train ride, Anushka reflected on a play she’d seen the day before.

A vibrant image occupied her thoughts: “Between crimson red scar[ves] and the tilted visage of [the] mid-day sun, twelve girls [her] age [voiced] the pain of the [Israel-Palestinian war] from a Palestin[ian] perspective.”

Hearing their story motivated Anuska to pause and meditate on the process of life and death. Her poetry ponders what a dead body means in the grand scheme of life and specifically to her.

She hopes readers “go away questioning… a quote [she] live[s] her life by: ‘you are alive ‘til the moment you can question why.’”

Anushka asks difficult questions of life and death to bring meaning to each sunset that rises and falls, using imagery as her storytelling aid.

She echoes the essence of a summer’s sunset by emphasizing both its physical and metaphorical roles in her piece.

Anuska indicates, “The physical presence is of the sun that burns literally on people's backs. It is in the form of the night falling right after the sunset. It comes in the form of purple and red. In a metaphorical way[,] the sunset is the dead body, the sunset is the bruises, the sunset is the rotten visage of a human being [and a] cadaver, it is the story of “everything animalistic and everything humane.”

This story’s form is like a sunset: it simultaneously acknowledges the palette of colors that beautify and bruise our world, begging the question of what it means to be human.