This
By Kyi May Kaung
This
Is what he has done to us
Ruler across the water
Lord of head and hair.
I will make you remember
The few days of trauma
Even in your lifetimes
Of happiness, content.
The first time, walking over water
February, toes in slippers frozen
Eating vegetarian
Can’t even afford to read the paper.
The day the bomb fell
will reel backwards and forwards forever.
The dead people drowned
When the ferry sank
In the back of the truck
Their flesh water-logged
Trembling, like unset
Jelly.
You will never forget
The sound of the tanks
On main street midnight in December
Children’s voices singing
National anthem fading out, song and children
Dying.
That summer at the BBC, when
The shooting began,
Over there broadcast live
You broke down and cried
Your mouth suddenly started
Speaking your native tongue, not spoken
Thirty years. You
went crazy active
Hitting your typewriter
5 AM.
In the land of plenty
You will remember
Hunger, scarcity
Unable to throw away
Empty bottles plastic bags
Scraps of food, your refrigerator
Overflowing. If you
want to continue
Buying books, you must learn to throw out.
We live in an apartment.
When she first arrived
At age fifty, a mail order bride
She stockpiled a roomful of newspapers
Empty oil containers
Back there you can sell them
By the viss, even the American embassy people
Or their servants, did this.
Here after six months finally
We paid someone to take out the junk.
Well clothed in Saville Row suits
Armani blazers, silk scarves signed Picasso
You will stash cloth by the hundreds of meters
A fire hazard oozing, out of the ceiling
The closets already
Full.
Suitcases full of underpants, brassieres
Just calculate how long it’ll take you to wear them
Realistically speaking, you’ll probably die first.
All the bras are already too tight. You’ve put on weight
Don’t fit, like your hybrid culture.
I gave two suitcases full of stuff to the refugees.
I made a pact with myself not to look inside.
I’ve saved all my memories too
Carefully packed in tissue paper
All my sinews bind to you, whatever I taste is not the same
My best cutlery, linen, never used.
As for me all I own is back there
Here I live temporarily, in rented
Digs.
This is what he has done to us.
c. 1994
