Thett, Ko Ko

Myanmar (Burma), (b. 1972)

Swine

  1. Like a pageant sow the pregnant moon has lowered herself
  2. to rub
  3. her spine against a pine limb.
  4.  
  5. if you dream of horses you will have to travel far. If you are
  6. in a
  7. town under a cavalry siege, your dreams surely will be
  8. equine.
  9.  
  10. If you dream of pigs you will remain where you are. The
  11. back
  12. garden of my childhood home was too small for a horse.
  13.  
  14. It was a pigpen. Pigs are enlightened winged horses. You
  15. don’t
  16. mount a Pegasus the way you mount a pig.
  17.  
  18. I rode bareback, I rode out all the revolutions.
  19.  
  20. Each time a young swine was castrated, all hell broke loose.
  21. When balls rolled, blood went everywhere.
  22.  
  23. The only Master I got to know was the young Master,
  24. whose
  25. speciality was swine sterilization.
  26.  
  27. Hooves still ruffle my feathers – hundreds of hoofs on
  28. gravel roar
  29. like tanks rolling at the Battle of The Vale of Tears.
  30.  
  31. In the post-apocalyptic world,
  32. only winged horses shall remain.
  33.  
  34. I am not so sure about that.

© Ko Ko Thett. Bamboophobia. Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press (2018).

About the Poet:

Ko Ko Thett, Myanmar (Burma), (b. 1972), is a poet, editor, translator and activist. He started publishing samizdat poems at Yangon Institute of Technology in the early 1990s. After a brush with the authorities, he left Burma in 1997, led an itinerant life and moved back to Myanmar in 2017.

His poems have been translated into several languages and widely anthologized. He writes in both Burmese and English. Thett is widely credited with introducing contemporary Burmese poetry to the English-speaking world with the acclaimed PEN Award-winning poetry 2013 anthology, Bones Will Crow, which he translated and co-edited with James Byrne. Thett is also a contributing editor of Mekong Review, and says he is a poet by choice and Burmese by chance. [DES-02/22]

Additional information:

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.