A Poem For My Teacher (Prof Asnani) Poem by Anuraag Sharma

It was an unknown number
he rang me up from.
My instant hello
instantly answered—Hello,
have you forgotten me?
And the contoured voice was read
aloud reverberating within
with a cognizance—Sir....
How are you?
I'm good. How about you?
As usual.
I could not get back to you
earlier. My apologies.
I have unremembered him, perhaps.
My pretences deceived him not
but myself.
Evening descends with
trailing shadows of a deliberate
dark that has been...
I am to send you a message.
I need your WhatsApp no.—a
little story about what a
teacher is and what he makes....
Time is a lead pencil studded
with an eraser at its tail.
It writes itself out and off, too.
I read the story and the message
of feeling proud to be what
he himself had been
and what he intended me to be.
An old teacher still refusing
to get old, he mistook me
to be the same in his remote dreams.
The glaucoma in his eyes
blinds him to what the lead pencil
has been scribbling and
erasing....
Evening descends sweeping the sun
off to a hillside.
Some nocturnal birds from an oblivious
has-been spread out their wings to
flutter around echoingly....
I am not the same you had once known.
A wild boar called System
insensitive and visionless, has
ripped apart a little drop tossed away
from the sea that you were
and still are.
And I did not remember you.
Some goats at my back
bleating aloud render one
like them shepherdless....
No, I am not Karna cursed
innocently by the one at whose
feet I had sat and learnt---
Upnisad—in terms literal.
It is easy to die. Not so,
though, to see oneself dying.
It pains.
But the callous order of the day
robbing me off my teacher
performs a post-mortem
upon a half-crumbled soul.
The battery is giving away.
Should I plug in my
cell phone for a recharge?