In heedless minds, in sitting rooms
The stupor buzzes too as dulling chants
A schoolteacher finds a library scant
And the young prefer each other's eyes
Than the damp-and-dust smelling books.

Dreams are built with classroom walls
As tongues struggle to circumlocute,
The books are neat and widely-spaced
Too neat the papers for the smudge of truth
And too dumb for one who queries:
Where is a history and heritage?
Moros surely know better more
Than killing and authored slanders!
And where are the things one sees around?
A discrepancy is too far wide to cover.

The officials mind the priced papers
As deck of cards would the gambling man,
Burdened people whose authority
Keep them from smiling back the fee.
Where feeds the mind on carcasses,
Pity the poor teacher whose glands
Boil with the midday heat on tin,
But pity more the young crinkles
Whose veins are as sponge to what
Educators call as education
(Or some white men's funny lotion)
Measured in percentile ranks as if
Learning needs a tag on the shelf.

The brown of the earth, the green
Of the grass and blue of the sky
Color not the paper chased,
A land is held away from the noses
In planted mines and emptied shells,
The barracks would have better served
As plantations for the native feasts.

A white man's intervention in the past
Now distorts the stalk and the trunk
It was for the wind then
But not for the birds,
Education is a bird astray.

- Isnani