Keshab Sigdel (Bardiya, Nepal)

Today, as every previous-year's day,
I'll meet a new batch of students
In my poetry class.
May be I‘ll talk to them on Chaucer
On how he democratically portrayed his characters
Or, may be, I'll, as always,
Romanticize Ginsberg as a Hippi-hero
And elaborate his experiments with sex and drugs;
Or, I may be overtaken by the personal life of Yeats
By failures of his love life
More than the philosophical visions in his poems.

They'll have expectations
And may end in impressions,
I'll also have expectations
But I'll need to continue on those impressions,
The way I've been doing these many years.

In the classroom
They'll be my students
Or, I will be their teacher, by reciprocation.
Very consciously, we'll build and maintain the distance
Of our being—as a teacher, as students.
Each day, we'll interact with each other
Through faces- foamy smiles this time, and frowns at other times.
In the turn of the year, before my poetry classes end
These new faces will soon be registered as' gold-old batch'
And I'll be left to expect new faces again.

At this moment of thought, as always,
I am drawn back to the same question:
With these fleets of fancy-fiery faces,
(As a new teacher to these new students) ,
Am I simply rehearsing to keep time away?