They were just following orders--a poem by Kyi May Kaung

They were just following orders.

They were just following orders
when it came to it no one could find out
where the orders came from all they knew was
they came from Above, not from the sky –
number one  blamed two and two blamed one
and the people blamed the Butcher
but guns do not all on their own suddenly
spout death with bayonets and live bullets.

Someone somewhere had first of all to decide
the budget would go more to guns than to butter
or rather more guns and bullets than rice –
than food rationed even in the relatively better
times, a bottle of cooking oil for a family of four
per month, a bottle of kersosene in four months
barely enough to soak the torn and twisted corkscrew-like
newspaper to start the fire going – sometimes four minute
lighter flints wrapped in paper and damp-headed, dead-
headed, matches that never ignite.  Then someone had to tell
all those soldiers to march five abreast
goose-stepping, down the streets.  Didn’t you
see on Nightline, this young man just
looking around, just passing the time, sitting
on the street – shooting the breeze – inside a
spare tire – slim
protection – suddenly shot
Wham!  In the chest. 

Somewhere
all these soldiers with their fingers on the
triggers.  During the Demonetization  toting up
the numbers on punched cards, we did not
even dare, to sneeze.  Somewhere someone had
to say, it’s time to shoot, it’s OK to shoot
children, their jinglees,  sharpened bicycle spokes
were dangerous, they taunted
the soldiers, for their lack of edu-
cation.  Does Provocation justify being
shot?

And someone who should have known better
says to me in America – they were warned not
to come out – the army would shoot to kill
and yet they did.  Whose fault is it?  I
look on in horror – would you say this – if it
were, your child?  Your son?  Now thirteen.
He says – But nothing happened
to the boy – Does that prove anything?

During the (first) Gulf War a man wrote to the
President of the United States:  Mr. Bush  if
my son dies I will not forgive you.  The
paramount leader says contemptuously
of his own people – with whom he wishes so
much to identify:  They quickly forget
anyone who has wronged them, they quickly
forgive.  But do you really think, the mother
of a 5’8” son, tall who came home, legs broken, in a 5’ coffin, who
stays silent out of fear, has really forgiven?

How long do you think it takes to grow
a baby into a man, nurtured every day
from when his shoulders were two finger joints wide
the soles of his feet, two finger widths, long? 

I can’t imagine how you could walk
that day in September.  On the radio before
I left for the railway station, I heard, the mood
is very grim --  the students are prepared to
die.  Two and a half  hours later as I get off the train in
Baltimore – my friend greeting me from
her little red car, says – It’s all over the army
has taken back power again, the students
have fled to the Border.  My feet are like
jelly, and walk along without any act of
volition on my part.  My friend had stopped
to buy a pink anthurium, and had forgotten
behind one of her twenty credit cards.
She said her husband heard the news on
his short wave radio.   

Suddenly I think of Oswięncim in the
winter, in February, the warehouses full
of women’s hair, children’s booties, suitcases,
pathetic names and addresses, written on each.  Spectacles
all sorted out systematically by type. 
Concrete slab tables used, to pull out the
gold fillings, before, the corpses are
incinerated.  Even killing can be mass
production.  Of hair, used to weave
upholstery.  My classmate from
Nigeria writes a poem – of how all that hair
now all a uniform color  because of the gas
was once also different in color, not just in
texture or was it curly or straight, short or
long – was once on some woman’s head
who was once loved by some man.  On the
way back from Auschwitz to Kraków, he shows
me the poem, on the bus. 

In the Spring in Majdanek near Lublin
my friend takes me through a field of
yellow dandelions.  We climb steps as up
a Burmese stupa.  She says though it’s a
lovely day, and we are on holiday, do
not smile for your picture.  It is not
appropriate here, Elsbièta says.  These are human
ashes – they only roofed it over, recently.

How much human ashes, must have
blown away in this open field, between the War
and our visit, in 1969?  How much ash
does one human being, make?
Ounces?   Pounds?  I think ounces.  When
my other friend’s father died and he was
cremated, she said she interred the
ashes in an urn.  I should have looked.
How much ashes does one human being – produce?

Copyright Kyi May Kaung
c. 1994