From the old building’s corner classroom
the teacher walked homeward
in the middle of a summer day
never to return to teach grammar,
or recite the children’s favourite
Silverstein poem.
The children listened for footsteps,
for the teacher to solve the problem
scribbled on the board; when she
did not return, they crouched
over desks, watching clock’s hands
sweep time.
As the sound of the school bell
echoed through whitewashed walls,
the children packed their bags
with uneaten lunches, unread books,
before wiping clean, notes
on the blackboard.
Strapped with flasks and bags,
the children’s feet dragged through
familiar paths, and from across rice fields,
music from a radio waded in;
thatch roofed houses glowed with
flickering lantern fires.
Over a brook made by monsoon rain,
a wobbly bamboo bridge
the children clambered
when a boy’s scream drowned
the hum of crickets and the roar
of thunder above.
In the stream, among pebbles,
algae, and moss, the listless body of
the teacher lay, her wavy hair pasty
with blood, face smeared with soil,
grey eyes open to a starless sky.
As night seeped in over the bridge,
rain pattered over town.
Distant gun fires lit up the sky
and across rice fields, the crackle
of a radio slowly faded
into the dead of the village.
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable. sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at editor@madrascourier.com.
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