Grave Image of a Noble College
earnestly inspired by a funeral officiant role
Nothing is ever achieved
without enthusiasm
Ralph Waldo……
reads a sign board bearing the
incomplete name of a great
writer amidst rotting garbage,
debris-like ruins,
a neighbour-occupied
fragment of land, rows of long-
locked classrooms, invasive weeds,
dung pats and
weird silence
perhaps an echo of
something soon afoot.
Suddenly
some lecture-noises
break down the memory
lane from an English class
of a great missionary college
way back from thirty years
noble and ignoble
college and collage
miser and misser
graveyard and grave yard
narcissist and echoist
dentist and dent-maker
lecturer and lecherer
hen-pecked and un-pecked,
some amusive neologisms,
the deft hands of our
wordsmith-like teachers used to
pull our toddling legs with
teaching us English English
instead of English Telugu
as today’s Anglophobes
without hiding themselves
in self-‘feathered nests’,
in some real estate or in
stone quarries as some
today’s tight-fisted “principal
-teacher”- entrepreneurs.
Only some adverbs of
the past echo now
in these peeling walls,
heaps of un-swept leaf-litter
and in the strings of aging
cobwebs that guard
the foul creatures
in the crevices of these
musty-smelling classrooms
all weaving the dark picture
that looks like a bird-
abandoned err-nest
and the old rusting locks
tired of the dangerous
contentment the handful of
elite spend time with sugarless
coffee and sugar-coated exchange
of affective pleasantries in this
onetime home of ours, that
once fathered and mothered us
with selfless objectives
with those honourable letters
beside our names we’re proud of
today, but angry with these people
that abandoned it to cobwebs
and creepy things, perhaps
it’s now soaked in the memories
when there was a real learning
and those teachers who parented
us with the skills of
applied knowledge unlike
the de-anglicizing teachers
of the day who enjoy their
mob-managed “honourable”
and “principled” in charge
positions just playing to
the poor crowds they deceive
washing their own dirty linen.
Only history remains
an interesting and a
timeless subject today.
A huge black glossy
scorpion suddenly comes
out of this English debris
of sublime absences
to heave a sigh of relief
after its sexagenarian’s
birthday with a sponsored cake.
The other day when I said,
Teaching profession
is no longer an armchair job
today, I appreciate the system
that demands your responsibility
for every rupee you are paid,
isn’t it?
a ghost-written English doctorate
turning away his plagiarised face
smirked
I don’t even deserve half of
what the government pays me
but I am proud of what I’m paid
in spite of my secret sinecure.
A ‘demon’stration of brazenness!
an extemporised defence
of the intellectual nakedness
of crippled fundamentals
aping the Churchilian rhetoric
that Dr.Luke reminds that
Christ timelessly counter-smirks:
fool! This very night your life
will be demanded from you.
Then who will get what you have
prepared for yourself? (Luke:20)
The personal rituals in the
“self-principled” chamber
evoke those of a funeral officiant
preparing the ground for the
last rites of a noble history
that surrenders to film events
and liquor advertisements
and the mint machined chair
puts on a paper-bravery on
its timid and guilty face.
A doctor who
manages a register
full of attendance
tries to repair the
dilapidated history
like a failed dentist
that tries to fix the
broken teeth of a
Terminal centenarian
with irregular visits with
a register-full signatures
for irregular classes
thus redefining ‘dentist’
as someone who dents
the system beyond recognition.
PS: An earnest picture of today’s sad plight of some aided colleges founded by the missionaries with a Noble mission which had a long history of great reputation.
English Medium Education in Andhra Pradesh
Peter had lost his rice fields and his
father in the Karamchedu massacre.
A fisher now, can’t speak English
his government Telugu medium
education didn’t offer unlike those
wealthy landlords’ in the expensive
private schools. English’ been only
a golden windfall in their dreams.
Now son too in one today, scaling an
emperor fish of his master’s pond says
I’ll be an English medium student from
tomorrow with no further expense
and adds the government announces
that privilege of English equal with the
landlords their corporate schools made with
English education that they had grabbed and
commanded the life’s knowledge domains
we lost to them that mint money, overseas
today. See those scared detractors protest
at the Benz Square of Vijaywada against the
government’s promises of the balanced regional
development to uproot the caste discrimination
as the nation’s first step to a future that will flutter
high above the nations on the anvils of the democracy.
About the Author
Sreekanth Kopuri is an Indian poet from Machilipatnam. He is the Current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer Journal Florida, Writer in Residence, Athens and a Professor of English. He was a Pushcart Nominee for his poem “Coffeying the Day into the Song of Solomon” for 2023. He physically recited his poetry in Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, Caen, Banja Luka, Gdanski and many universities. His poems appeared in Two Thirds North, Arkansas Review, A Honest Ulsterman, San Antonio Review, Chicago Memory House, Tulsa Review, Digging Press Journal, Expanded Field, South Broadway Journal, Contrapuntos, Untethered Review, A New Ulster, Vayavya, American Diversity Report, Plants & Poetry, Burrow, Rational Creature, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry San Jose, Oddball Magazine, to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void was the winner of Golden Book of the year 2022. Kopuri was deeply influenced by Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry.
