After the pub, we eat curry and watch

oddly dressed figures from an exotic academe.

Enrobed in their Levis and 70’s wild hair

they dance behind the dust on the TV screen.

We see the thoughts of Euler and Gauss,

appear as lists of poker faced glyphs

and slowly digest long pondered lemmas

delivered to us via the spells of UHF.

Many years later, the cathode has cooled.

Some memories remain, but mostly they’re gone.

The magical echoes of those broadcast thoughts

have faded like the snap of an old popadom.

VHS has departed, as have the folks with wild hair.

But with the theorems they taught, their students propound

the communication protocols

that now send us net bound.

We no longer embrace in the rooms where we met

and Google is now god in our church of the Web.

But teachers still teach and poets still speak

though sadly I’m now too old for curry before bed.