An Old Student Who Has Recently lost Her Son Writes To Her teacher… Poem by Anuraag Sharma

And you taught me—it is a
world of imperfections. Even God
is imperfect. And I believed. Was
shocked to learn that an imperfect
God can only create an imperfect world.
Then why, why this quest for perfections?
Why have you, Plato, befooled the generations?
If the Idea is the truth, then truth
itself is a lie. And you taught me the willing
suspension of disbelief, that the very suspension
of disbelief may not mean total belief for after all
all deaths do never precede resurrection.

Can my child come back, come back for a while?

And you taught me that there is no beauty
without wisdom and no wisdom
without suffering—said Keats. And my losses
have told upon my skin, my being, my
soul leaving indelible labyrinths of
so-called wisdom that it has been a beginning
in sport and a gradual ending in sport, too.
But the game is not yet over. The greedy player
is possessed by an untiring intent, a debauch
of toying is He who craves for a fresh life
to play with each night. And it has been a long and
dark night for me, never perhaps to have
any dawn when my child comes back for a while.
And you taught me that man can be
destroyed but not defeated—murmured Santiago.
But Santiago was an old fisherman
made courageous by the shadow of
a Manolin, forbidden, though to accompany.
And a Marlin-mom is defeated, not
destroyed, though.

Cannot my child come back just for a while?

And you taught me that Ahab cried—"I'll spit
at the sun if it insults me". My throat is
choked, my tongue parched. My finger-tips
burn in the flames of a funeral pyre. I lie
insulted and I cannot….
No, no I'm no Ahab. The sea has
devoured my sperm-whale and the sun
spits at me. And you taught me
that one's suffering cannot be greater
than what one can bear. And I've suffered
and I've borne, when ma left me, never
to come back, and a lonely father broken
and a long, long mum seeping
in all the corners of our rented house and
a life mortgaged to years and
years to follow. And I've paid and
paid as if never paid before. I did pay
when he dragged me out, thrashed me
in public and demanded his seed back—the seed!
now, lost for ever.
Will my child come back, come back for a while?
And you taught me that Hamlet
was an artistic failure having
no objective co-relative. And the world
now seems an obnoxious failure sans HE,
sans my anchor creaking down
under a Mumbai metro. The deafened
motherly ears tongue out
a primal silence—the objective co-relative
to the last hope lost! And you taught me
that the greatest is the poetry of loss.
And what mean poem is this life—the left-over
after a death-feast of one who left
me rendering the rest all posthumous.
And you taught me that tragedy feels
when something beautiful is bruised.
And death bruises not, only life does.
The presence of an absentee is
painfully beautiful. A yew tree
silhouetted against a smoky evening!
And you taught me that the demands
of life and those of poetry are different.
Then why did you teach me poetry that
seeped into my life with no poetic justice?
And you taught me that it is wisdom
to believe the heart. But what heart? A heap
of broken rainbow! A withered leaf!
A crammed scroll! !
Wisdom is an eyewash, yet another
lie—a scaffold to a falling horizon—a soggy truth.
Lear, you taught but did not teach me
that a dead Cordelia, reborn, must
carry the body of her sonny
father, once again, and
cry ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life
and thou no breath at all…. ‘
And no Tess I am, but still the P of Immortals
has not ended his sport.
And till the game is on, Dear Teacher,
bundle up your Shakespeares and Miltons
and Coleridges and Eliots. The planets move
even without them on the callous orbits
of suffering—the Truth prima,
the Lie ultima.