While students are confusing with their chatters
the classroom atmosphere as at the wooden desks
they take their seats before the lesson starts,
a bird glides through the open window,
swooping on th’ irridescent sunlight filtered by the trees
brimmed with the scent of the moon–budded dew,
and ushers in the glimmer of a halo
distilled upon the ripples of the sable beak
and pupils taking shape before the eyes
of one shy student, who, poised for the boredom
of the inevitable victory of time o’er dreaming,
reflects: ‘and yet the birds still pour
from branching shadows in the trees
their pure melodious gold to celebrate
th’ invisible refulgence of a light
that permeates the sky without restraints
even if my pensive moods can’t feel it.’
As the bird dips through the air’s effervescence,
his wings expand in the refracted weaving
of light embroidered by its brilliant darkness
to flash the colours of a pied flycatcher,
who with each treble of his feather seems
to be swelled by the backwash of his flight,
till in the body of a magpie he appears,
now hovering above a student’s desk, just to
reach for the wooden surface with his limbs
that stretch into the elongated silhouette
of a black heron tapering in a spear beak.
Immediately after his landing, the bird
spreads out his wings around his tucked-in head
to mantle with the girdle of his pinions
the table, circling in their gloomy dome a shade
that teems with grovelling shivers hidden
from the view of the curious students.
Meanwhile, another bird has flown in from the window
and came to stand beside the heron, who at once
lifts from the cupola’s blank glow his head to fix
his eyes upon the mirroring gaze of a hawk,
where he perceives himself in his reflection
before transforming into th’ other’s image
to elevate their senses to their common nature.
Without the feathered curtain covering the table,
a large hole at its centre is revealed, which the two hawks
traverse in one short plunge, eclipsing in the dark
their plumage with the borrows there concealed.
Without the students leaning from their seats
to peer into the void where the birds vanished,
an unrelenting bellowing is issued from the ground
below the students’ feet, compelling them to pore
over the classroom floor, where at its centre a
huge crater has emerged with at the bottom
two cobras girdled by each other’s coils,
in the pre-coital wrestle of their mating ritual,
clutched in their bundle of a mortal love
in which the female is entangled by the tail
to the hose of a vacuum cleaner with
an active chainsaw rattling at its end;
and as the female is enraptured by her throes,
she trusts the wrapping trunk she’s trapped in
that pulls its spinning teeth against her scales,
thus carving from her flesh the spouting
of the flayed muscles in a scarlet fountain,
exposing through the blood’s incessant flow
the twining of the adamantine, indestructible,
links of a chain that are her spine’s true bones.
The students with their rulers angle from the pit
the mingled clot of animal and artificial parts,
for then dismantling with a compass at their desk
the vacuum cleaner while a tube for artworks
sticks to the cobra’s mouth to be her muzzle,
releasing lastly from her torments the gored female,
of whose just a few rings from her metallic armour
are left to dangle loosely from her severed head,
which hisses still with the same sparking life
that spurred her throbbing frame down in the pit.
Before resigning her again to freedom,
a student volunteers to cure her wounds,
and from the mixing of the tables’ sawdust
with his own spittle, he concocts a paste,
which he proceeds to hold in his cupped hands,
as with eyes closed and arms raised to the sky,
he murmurs prayers to some unknown divinities,
until the clumped amalgam starts to glow.
Excited by the gaze of his astonished classmates
fixed on himself, and the success he’d really
not thought his praying would accomplish,
the student grabs the cobra by her collar
and plasters the exposed joints with his balsam;
but when he tries again to summon with his voice
the forces of the sky to breathe new warmth
into the moulded flesh surrounding the cold chain,
he can’t, as he’s too scared that while his eyes
are closed the snake will pierce him with her fangs,
and in an utter state of mental agitation
he drops the snake that darts to find
a nook among the students’ bags in which
she disappears. Demoralized
by having to recall that he is not
omnipotent, the student asks the classroom
to stand upon the desks as he kneels down
to scour the ground for any hidden niche
wherein the cobra might be lying.
Then, suddenly, one of his mates exclaims:
‘it’s over there’ while pointing at the top
of a fir tree outside the window where the crown
of the refulgent sun seems to be perching.
But he’s not deigning the remark of his attention,
as he well knows that it’s too early for the snake
to have achieved her seat among the distant stars.
As hard as he might try, his search yields no results,
and he decides to comfort all his colleagues
with the reassurance that no risk is lurking;
but just as he invites them to resume their seats,
another student shouts at the top of her lungs
that she has found the snake next to her foot
and dropped her hurriedly in the trash bin.
Loath to accept that someone might have handled
the primal fury from which he had to recoil,
the student walks up to the other student
without the courage to inquire how it was done;
but her laugh at his visible embarrassment,
fills him with –contrary to what he would have thought–
a feeling of relief and joy, and finally he asks
if he could toss the contents of the garbage can
back in the crater, where now it will be
the snake and her regenerative capacity
which will redeem the waste of generations
with the recurrence of her healing.

– Anonhimoose