MYANMAR

by Maia Justine Storm 

as they waited for the UN to help,

my Burmese friends said

coop for coup

and vocalized both the b’s in bomb

 

i knew what they meant

i was too sad to correct them

 

five years later, caught 

between 

the cruelty of two dictators,

one here, one there,

they ask for legal guidance

 

yet once more, sadness gets

in the way

 

as Nurul Amin Shah Alam 

dies, not in Arakan, but here, 

not from genocide

but from cruelty of a lesser,

still homicidal, degree

Maia Justine Storm is a 78-year-old woman living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She has been an immigration attorney for 25 years and has returned to her adolescent dream of being a poet.  Most recently, she has been published in Poetry Superhighway where she was a Poet of the Week, haikuniverse, Antifa Lit Journal, The Mersey Review, and in forthcoming issues of Procrastinating Writers United and Thema.

THE FLOATING PEOPLE

by Mark Tarren

Kulsuma Begum, 40, a Rohingya refu­gee, cries while recounting her story at Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. She said that her daughter was missing and that her husband and son-in-law were killed by Burmese soldiers. Photo source: Hannah Mckay/Reuters via The Washington Post, October 29, 2017.

We are the sea
of people

that flows from Rohingya
to Bangladesh.

We are the sea
of colour

red veils
shirts of saffron
violet dresses
that flows through green
banked rivers.

We are water.
There is mud and hunger
in our footprints

they call us insects
they call us

The Floating People.

We live in our

shared Book of Stories
so that our children will know
where they came from

our shared drawings
our songs
our taranas.

Where we remember home.

We are life. We are sky.
We are air.

When they burnt our babies alive
we looked to the east
towards Arakan
to the mountains of Arakan Yoma
and remembered many things

the colour of rooftops
where we had dried food

the colour of fields
where we once loved

the colour of turmeric and chilis

it is the colour of fire.


Mark Tarren is a poet and writer based in Queensland, Australia. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary journals including The Blue Nib, Poets Reading The News, and Street Light Press.