Myanmar (Burma), (b. 1972)
Swine
- Like a pageant sow the pregnant moon has lowered herself
- to rub
- her spine against a pine limb.
- if you dream of horses you will have to travel far. If you are
- in a
- town under a cavalry siege, your dreams surely will be
- equine.
- If you dream of pigs you will remain where you are. The
- back
- garden of my childhood home was too small for a horse.
- It was a pigpen. Pigs are enlightened winged horses. You
- don’t
- mount a Pegasus the way you mount a pig.
- I rode bareback, I rode out all the revolutions.
- Each time a young swine was castrated, all hell broke loose.
- When balls rolled, blood went everywhere.
- The only Master I got to know was the young Master,
- whose
- speciality was swine sterilization.
- Hooves still ruffle my feathers – hundreds of hoofs on
- gravel roar
- like tanks rolling at the Battle of The Vale of Tears.
- In the post-apocalyptic world,
- only winged horses shall remain.
- I am not so sure about that.
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:
- Ko Ko Thett – https://kokothett.webs.com/
- Bamboophobia, Thett’s second collection in English
- The Burden of Being Burmese, Thett’s first major single-volume collection to appear in English and written by a contemporary Burmese poet.