Two Poems

Ko Ko Thett

curfew

when you came to see me
i was taking a walk
out of my nostalgia         
that’s why i bumped into you in the street
childhood remains misty
since you bring it up
i recall
that little red ball i kicked up into the sky
when i was a little boy
it still has yet to land back on my lap
you said you’d teach me
proper owl hoot
you haven’t
we were inseparable
we never knew world-weariness 
your hair and mine
braided together, our heads back to back
you look to the future
me always at the moment
we didn’t have much of a past
we haven’t met since that day
that day we saw hundreds of corpses
floating on their stomach in pain creek
those shallows
we always skipped school for a swim
you were among the dead
still i keep an eye out for your visitations 
i still don’t understand  
why in our town
only fruit trees were whitewashed
defying curfew is not the same as defying martial law
you said, i disagreed
these days
i hardly go out anyway
even now
here i am
just to check the empty streets
to see
if the poison bulbs
i planted in the potholes the other night
have blossomed

— —

mother: a life in four acts 

1948

post-war baby 
twined 
with independence 
born feet-first
placenta, planted under 
a rain tree 

1962 

bloody putsch 
on the bloody day 
of her first period

revolutionary council
no! 
revolution, revolution!

street dogs die 
in convolution 
poisoned meat 
from army trucks  

1988 

to infant mortality 
she lost her firstborn 
to a life of toil  
her husband 
son, sixteen, 
to conscription 
daughter, fourteen, 
to adolescence  
she tells her, 
’hitch up your htabi into a nappy 
for menses, 
against men!’  

2021

trauma 
shrinks brain

alzheimer’s  
a merciless mercy

deaf, but not deaf 
to martial music on the loop 
on national radio

htabi, hitched up

she is ready