Goodbye Examination

Once again I have prepared
For an examination
By picking up some dust-ridden olden
Carriers of the knowledge
Those have been adorning my chaotic table
For many a long academic eras!
My preparations lasted for several years
With several not-so-long months,
Sleepless nights and
Chilly early mornings
Those provoked me some time
To curse the unending warfareWith the black-inked
Tiny pack of letters
Stamped on cheap white papers, and
Many a times it made some of
My fellow beings envious
And made some of them to appreciate
With heart felt admiration!


Shakespeare, the bard came
In my visions many times
In the late night,
Sometimes, Eliot and Dickens came
In the early morning with
Their portrait-like amusing smiles
That even made them alive in between
The quests for a theme from the
Random paths of life that they trod.
Certain Women writers of the West
Amazed me with their mastery over
The flowery fiction
Covered in their long term sufferings of
Diseases and isolation -
Like Austen and Bronte sisters.

Indians too were there
Who made me stun at the word power.
Tagore came first with
His Song offerings,
Later Toru, with her short-term life
And her homesick writings
Too had made even the owners of the language
Stuck at the thorns of amusement.
Arundhati and many more
Supplied me with wonder at
Their imagination power.

Many a days in the morning
I rode my bike through an endless way
Covering several kilometers
Touching city struggles as well as village virtues
To a center where I let drop
The burden of language
Wasted by those masters ofLiterature. And I returned, throughSome familiar paths after
A three hours struggle with the
University paper and clutched pen
With aching sinews of palm.

Now it is all over,
The struggle with the forced yawns,
The read through the lines without a blink, and
The speedy revision just before
The last bell,
The tension on the hall ticket, and
The agony on the finishing moments, all!
And occupied now with an effort to
Gain the longing sleeps and lost dreams.