A guy in my neighborhood died the other day.

He had little spats with his neighbor for years.

After hearing the news, his neighbor cried

And said: It’s me next, my friend.

In boxing, both the winner and the loser

Will be asked to leave the ring in the end.

Time and again, I wake up on battlefields,

Surrounded by dead bodies.

I wake up with a great sense of loneliness,

And survival has become completely tiring.

In the end, battlefields always bend like rainbows.

You know a crow when you see one

Because a crow will always be a crow.

But when you know someone to be your enemy,

He is never your enemy.

Baby, this hand, which is touching you right now,

Has failed to keep its hold on human civility

The same way your laughter has eluded

Public decipherments. We look at each other.

In our eyes, smoke from gunpowder

Which I call adversities of life

Falls like red flowers from a Flamboyant tree.

I take pride in this art of happiness.

- translation by Maung Day
- photo by Yến Dương

__________________________________________________________

 

ရန္သူကို ေသခ်ာ ခ်ိန္ပစ္ၾက

ဟိုေန႔က အိမ္နီးနားခ်င္း တစ္ဦးေသတယ္
သူနဲ႔ ႏွစ္ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာ ရန္ျဖစ္ေနက် အိမ္နီးခ်င္းက
ငိုတယ္ "မင္းၿပီးေတာ့ ငါေပါ့တဲ့"

လက္ေ၀ွ ့စင္ဆိုတာ ဘယ္သူ႐ႈံး႐ႈံး
ႏွစ္ေယာက္စလံုး စင္ေပၚက ဆင္းရတာပဲ

လူ႔ဘ၀ထဲ ငါ တစ္ေယာက္ထဲ ပ်င္းစရာ
စစ္ေျမျပင္မွာ ေသဆံုးသြားၾက သူမ်ားၾကားက
ငါ အခါခါ ျပန္ထလာခဲ့ တဲ့ အထီးက်န္မႈ ့နဲ႔
စစ္ေျမျပင္ဟာ သက္တန္႔လို ေကြးၫြတ ္ၿပီးဆံုးျမဲ

က်ီးကန္း ကို က်ီးကန္းမွန္း သိသည့္တိုင္
က်ီးကန္းကေတာ့ က်ီးကန္းပဲ
ရန္သူဆိုတာေတာ့ ရန္သူမွန္းသိရင္ကို
ရန္သူ မဟုတ္ေတာ့ပါဘူး

ခ်စ္ေလးေရ ...မင္းကိုဖက္ထားတဲ့ လက္ဟာ
လူ႔ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ ့က အျမဲ ကြၽံထြက္သြားမိ
မင္းရယ္သံဟာ
အမ်ားသံုး အဓိပၸါယ္ကေန အျမဲ ေခ်ာ္ထြက္သြားမိ
ငါတို႔ အျပန္အလွန္ ၾကည့္တဲ့ အၾကည့္မွာ
ေလာကဒံ အမည္႐ွိ ယမ္းေငြ ့မ်ားက
စိန္ပန္းလို နီနီရဲရဲ တဖြဲဖြဲ ေႂကြက်..
ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ျခင္း အတတ္ေၾကာင့္ ဂုဏ္ယူရပါတယ္