Chalk Dust And Empty Pockets Poem by Yousif Ibrahim Abubaker Abdalla

Everything is possible in this bewildered world where justice walks with a wounded knee and wisdom is bartered cheaper than dust in the wind.
In Sudan, a teacher rises before dawn, not to gather dreams,
but to gather coins thin and pale as hope at month's end.
His pockets whisper emptiness.
His children wait like unanswered prayers.
Yet he presses his shirt with quiet pride and carries a nation
beneath his arm as though it were a fragile book.
Chalk quivers between his fingers.
It blossoms into letters, into numbers, into destinies that will one day wear polished shoes and speak from marble halls forgetting the dust that first shaped their names.
Far away, in Germany, they once asked Angela Merkel:
"Why not raise the judges and engineers, the builders of courts and bridges, to equal the teachers? Why is the teacher's wage the highest? "
And she replied a truth ringing like iron on stone: "How can I make you equal to those who taught you? " How indeed when every title was once a trembling child tracing letters on a board?
Yet here, the lecturer beneath a leaking roof counts a salary too fragile to bear the weight of bread, medicine,
transport, dignity.
Universities sigh in dim corridors.
Degrees glitter in frames,
but the hands that forged them
grow thin with fatigue.
The mind of the nation is valued less than its loudest voice.
O cruel arithmetic where wisdom subtracts from hunger
and hunger remains.
Where the candle that kindle a thousand flames melts into silence.
Everything is possible
in this strange world where the gardener of minds cannot harvest his own peace.
Still, he writes on the blackboard as if inscribing the Horizon, believing that somewhere between chalk dust and unpaid months,
a generation will remember
the hands that first taught them to rise.