Dead Poets Society

In the flickering hush of that old‐fashioned Houghton‑like campus,
the stone‑crusted walls seemed to chuckle at the ordinary.
Mr Keating, with a grin that stole from the light‑hearted galleons of a far‑away Peruvian gull,
taught the boys to cherish the wild colours of thought: daring, desperate, free.

“Be curious, be bold—ardour abounds
where goose‑egg mornings break the silence,”
he whispered, a hushed vespers for the psyche,
and the pupil’s eyes sharpened like the blade of a sea‑saw’s cutter.

Across an English‑speaking isle, a society sat,
etched in parchment, ink‑soaked, in Lloyds‑style verses,
the name a paradox whispered in corridors of fear:
the Dead Poets Society – a living thought of the dead.

“Carpe diem!”—the opening echo of the chimes – and
the boys, woven in the texture of Tudor life,
dodged the invisible chains of cronyism, peered through the façades of culture, and realised that to write was to set a rock against the tide.

On that culmination of autumn, they stood – upright, spirits nearly high–hewn –
celebrating the unravelling of each other’s bound lives;
the conspicuously bright play in the CAP, dreadful to unfurl but an honest ode to their fates.

And in memory of those, the flash of tears – a crystalline gem dealt in the least...
a sentiment, warm, raw, it has never pardoned?
——
In the quiet, the poems live again, forever breathing…