LITTLE ROHINGYA

by Probal Basak

Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi is expected to defend her military against allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice. The army is accused of targeting the country's Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017. A documentary being aired on Al Jazeera sheds new light on the abuses. Al Jazeera's Osama Bin Javaid reports. —Al Jazeera, November 24, 2019

I’m Alfred, Suu, caged
in your dark cabinet. Once
a gilded trophy, now stained
with blood, Suu, I am here,
seeking freedom from fear.

Omar appears in my dreams
as red tears from the beachfront
of Cox’s Bazar flow like a stream,
Suu, do you know little Omar?

Omar met me at the town square at midnight,
waking from nightmares after the family burial,
to share dreams of rowing across the bloody sea.
In the fog of gunpowder, I walked by his side over
bruised sisters, raped mothers, dead fathers,
brothers boot-stamped.

No, Omar didn’t ask me to desert you,
Suu. It’s me, haunted by bloodshed,
your glittering bearded Alfred.
It’s time you loosen my harness.

Oh! Suu, my silent mistress!
I too want to cross over to join
Omar at Cox’s Bazar.

Oh!  The power of powerless
chokes me here, Suu, I am here,
seeking freedom from fear.

Probal Basak is employed as on officer with the Department of Information & Cultural Affairs, Government of West Bengal, India. His parents, refugees from Bangladesh, settled in West Bengal during the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Probal grew up hearing stories of of the suffering of millions of migrated people.

NIGHT FELL, BUT SHE DID NOT SLEEP

by Devon Balwit

Photo: Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh after crossing the Naf River this month. Credit Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

In the next violent blur of moments, the soldiers clubbed Rajuma in the face, tore her screaming child out of her arms and hurled him into a fire. She was then dragged into a house and gang-raped. By the time the day was over, she was running through a field naked and covered in blood. Alone, she had lost her son, her mother, her two sisters and her younger brother, all wiped out in front of her eyes, she says. —The New York Times, October 11, 2017. 

It’s a story you tell and tell, each time entering
by a different scar: this the burned baby, this

the clubbed jaw, this the rapes, over and over.
Even when you say nothing, you tell it, your eyes

so loud others turn away, unable to bear it
as you one more flee the burning, naked.

Their own children paint similar pictures,
paining the aid workers: soldiers shooting,

the fallen, red sources, riverine. You drift
like a storm cloud until, again, there is too much

in you to hold, then you break. People fold
down their tent flaps. You understand. What

can be done with you—a hole with a voice,
a ghost with a body, an endless affront?

You shudder canvas as you pass. The next surge
swells. It runs through you. It mows you down.


Devon Balwit is a writer/teacher from Portland, OR. Her poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News, Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Redbird Weekly Reads, Rise-Up Review, Rat's Ass Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Mobius, What Rough Beast, and more.

FOR THE ROHINGYA

by Charise M. Hoge




There are some
who must turn fire
into a tidal wave,
become a waterfall
mountain cascade.
But they are not liquid
made. Sinewy and limbed,
in limbo a long walk
from any land with their name,
where any can say “mine”.
Mine becomes the casualty
of forwardness, of egress.
Damages damming arrival
of a people––unchampioned,
already damned.

Charise M. Hoge, MA, MSW, is a dance/movement therapist, performing artist, and writer. She is co-author of the book A Portable Identity: A Woman’s Guide to Maintaining a Sense of Self While Moving Overseas, and her poetry chapbook Striking Light from Ashes was published July 2017 by Finishing Line Press.

POEM FOR THE POETS OF MYANMAR

by Jo-Ella Sarich

Myo Yan Naung Thein "spent six months in prison last year after posting a satirical poem to Facebook deemed insulting to the then president Thein Sein. Two of the lines read: 'I have a tattoo of the president’s face on my penis / My wife is disgusted.'" —“Free speech curtailed in Aung San Suu Ky’s Myanmar as prosecutions soar,” The Guardian, January 8, 2017

That time you
lay, wine-numbed, upon the bench
cling-wrapped like luncheon meat, and branded
yourself ‘Slut’ in another language
(accidentally, you didn’t discover until that
night out in Roppongi)

When you ran outside and cried
into the sun. And
That friend had
her twin’s names tattooed
on her wrist, and tattooed
Angel wings around
the name of the one
who first learned to Fly.

When That razor
was like a river in your hand
when you dug deep so they would see,
that being is just a hair’s breadth. When you carve
Freedom, and it’s just a word written in another language, just
thousands of tiny pin pricks that span the world. Like
light seen from space, if you see his back it’s
golden with his scars. I want to

Run

my fingers along them with the lightest touch,
connect them like humanitarian corridors. Because you can’t
lose those scars. But That leopard
could change its spots just by dreaming it can Fly, so

turn the page quietly, and I’ll write you a poem
in a place where no-one will ever read it.

Jo-Ella Sarich lives in Petone, New Zealand beside the beautiful Wellington harbour. She has worked as a lawyer for a number of years, and has a husband and two small girls. She has recently started writing again in her spare time. Her poetry has appeared in Tuck Magazine and The Galway Review, and will be appearing in the upcoming Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017.

ALL CREATED EQUAL EXCEPT

by Charles Frederickson & Saknarin Chinayote

Rohingya migrants with airdropped food. A boat carrying them and scores of others, including young children, was found floating in Thai waters; passengers said several people had died. Credit Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via NY Times, May 15, 2015

Pitiful bane of subhuman existence
Despised by masses spewing contempt
Rohingya without nationality precarious allegiance
Leaky boats sunken nightmares capsized

No destined port of call
No place to be somebody
Homeless hapless hopeless leper outcasts
Unwelcome turned away nobody cares

Bedraggled bastards barely hanging on
Dysfunctional once upon family angst
Bony ghosts haunted by skeletons
Wronged inhuman rights constantly betrayed

Blind justice labeling terrorized victims
Raped pillaged occupation unanswered queries
Haunted by Islamophobia anti-Moslem bashing
Hateful demons lacking compassionate kindness

Unanchored adrift dead man’s float
Bloated corpses buried at sea
Long-festering festering wound abscessed
Help beyond intensive care horizon


No Holds Bard Dr. Charles Frederickson and Mr. Saknarin Chinayote proudly present YouTube mini-movies @ YouTube – CharlesThai1 

UNTHINKABLE

by Ed Bennett





COLLEGE PARK, Maryland (Reuters) May 7, 2013 – Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama on Tuesday decried Buddhist monks’ attacks on Muslims in Myanmar, saying killing in the name of religion was “unthinkable”.

East and West,
different in temperament
and religious thought
yet closer than imagined,
Enlightened One.

We bear the stink
of murdered saviors in
our advanced Western tribes;
our savagery worshiped
as an act of commemoration
that leaps from holy texts
to pretexts for slaughter
in the name of an abandoned God.

Good and Evil
wrap their tendrils
at each other’s throat and fist
so say your Wrathful Budhisattvas

and now your children bring fire,
bring wrath to every infidel
as a liberation for their soul.
It is, Enlightened One, eminently thinkable
when night obscures starlight
and flames quench the darkness.
One must consider the unspoken precept:
human nature trumps a tranquil soul.


Ed Bennett is a poet and reviewer living in Las Vegas, NV. His works have appeared in The Externalist, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Lavender Review, Quill and Parchment and Lilipo. He is a staff editor for Quill and Parchment Magazine, the recipient of a Pushcart Nomination and the author of “A Transit of Venus”.