ပဥၥလက္ေတာင္တန္း

က်ေနာ္ ...
၁၉၉၃ - ခုႏွစ္ထဲမွာ
တပ္မဟာ (၁) နယ္ေျမလို႕ေခၚတဲ့
ဖါးအံ၊ ဖါပြန္၊ က်ဳိက္ထို၊ သထံုၿမိဳ႕နယ္ေတြဆီ
ခရီးထြက္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။
ဒီမိုကရက္တစ္ျမန္မာ့အသံ (DVB) ရဲ႕ ကြင္းဆင္းသတင္းေထာက္အျဖစ္နဲ႔ သြားခဲ့ရတာပါ။
အဲဒီအေတြ႕အႀကံဳေတြအေပၚမူတည္ၿပီး
“ပဥၥလက္ေတာင္တန္း” ကဗ်ာရွည္တပုဒ္ကို ေရးခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဒါကို ... ခ်စ္မိတ္ေဆြ ကဗ်ာဆရာ “ေယာဟန္ေအာင္” က
အဂၤလိပ္လို ဘာသာျပန္ေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။
အခု ...
“ပဥၥလက္ေတာင္တန္း” ခရီးသြားကဗ်ာရွည္ကို
အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာျပန္နဲ႔တြဲၿပီး ေဖာ္ျပလုိက္ပါတယ္။


(၁)

အိပ္ယာထေစါတဲ့
ဥၾသငွက္ဟာ
ေနေရာင္တံစက္ၿမိတ္မွာ
ပိတ္ထားတဲ့ ေလာကတံခါးကို
သီခ်င္းနဲ႔ တြန္းဖြင့္လိုက္တယ္။

ငါ ပုန္းေအာင္းအိပ္စက္ခဲ့ရာ
ေက်ာက္ေတာင္ရဲ႕ထိပ္
ေနေရာင္လြလြ ဖြဖြဆဆ
ရြရြဆိတ္ဆိတ္ ေသြးစဖိတ္က်
ေလာကဆည္းဆာ ကဗ်ာအျဖစ္
ငါ ခ်စ္လိုက္မိ။

ေတာင္ေျခေအာက္က
ကၽြဲခေလာက္သံထဲမွာ
စံပယ္နံ႔ကို ငါရွဴတယ္။
ျဖဴညစ္ညစ္ ႏွင္းထုေအာက္
အျပာႏုႏုကို ထြင္းေဖာက္ကာ
သံလြင္ျမစ္ကို ေျခရာေကာက္ေနမိတယ္၊
ကမၻာ့တဖက္ျခမ္း
မီးေတာင္ႏႈတ္ခမ္းက
ပန္းထြက္လာတဲ့ မီးလ်ံေတြထဲမွာ
“ေဗၚဒလယ္” ရဲ႕ ငရဲပန္းမ်ားကိုျမင္လိုက္ရ
သူ႕ရဲ႕
မီးလိုပူျပင္းလွပ
ညလို တိတ္ဆိတ္စြာေပါက္ကြဲ
ကဗ်ာထဲက
ဒဏ္ရာရေနတဲ့ ၀ိညာဥ္မ်ား
ငါ့ထံ
ပ်ံသန္းလာၾကေပါ့။

(၂)
“မိဆိုင္းေတာင္” ဟာ
ကာလမည္မွ်ၾကာေအာင္ အိပ္ခ်င္ေယာင္ေဆာင္ခဲ့ၿပီလဲ။
သူ ဒီလိုနဲ႔
သမုဒၵရာၾကီးေအာက္က ကုန္းထခဲ့။

သူ ဒီလိုနဲ႔
စမ္းေခ်ာင္းမ်ားစြာ မႈတ္ထုတ္ခဲ့။

သူဒီလိုနဲ႔
လူသားတခ်ိဳ႕ကို ေခၽြးးသုပ္
လူသားတခ်ိဳ႕ကို ေမြးထုတ္ခဲ့။

အခုေတာ့
သူဟာ
ၾကီးျမတ္လွတဲ့
သဘာ၀ရဲ႕ဘ၀
သမိုင္းရဲ႕ သေကၤတျဖစ္ခဲ့ၿပီ။
သူ႕ကို
အေ၀းကျမင္ရေတာ့ လွတယ္
အနားကိုေရာက္ေတာ့ ေၾကာက္တယ္။
သူ႕ကိုတို႕ထိရတဲ့အခါ
သူ႕ေရကို ေသာက္တဲ့အခါ
လံုၿခဳံံေႏြးေထြး ေသြးခ်င္းေပါင္းစပ္
သူနဲ႕ငါ
တစ တစ နီးကပ္လာခဲ့။
အခုေတာ့
သူ႕လည္ပင္းမွာ ငါတြဲခိုစီး
သီခ်င္းၿငီးခဲ့။
သူ႕ေခါင္းေပၚကပန္းေတြ ငါေခၽြခဲ့။
သူ႕လက္ေပၚ ငါအိပ္ေပ်ာ္ခဲ့။
သူ႕နဖူးထိပ္မွာ ငါရပ္ေနဆဲ
ကြင္းျပင္ထဲက ေတာအုပ္ေတြ
ၿခံဳံပုတ္ေလးေတြ ျဖစ္သြားေပါ့။
“မိဆိုင္းေတာင္” ေအာက္မွာ
အရာ၀တၳဳမ်ား
“၀ိုင္းယက္” ရဲ႕ ပန္းခ်ီကားလို
အျပားလိုက္ အလ်ားလိုက္ျမင္ေနရ
အဲဒီမွာ ဂ်ဴးဗန္းရဲ႕ “ကာလယႏၱယား”
ငါ ငွားၿပီးစီးခဲ့။
ဟိုအေ၀းဆီက
အစိမ္းေရာင္ အုန္းေတာထဲ
ေသမင္းတမန္မ်ား
ပ်ံ၀ဲခုန္ဆင္းသြားၾက။
“ဒံုသမိေခ်ာင္း”အေနာက္ဖက္ကမ္း
ရန္သူ႕စခန္းဆီက
ေသြးညီီနံ႕ေတြ ေလထဲလြင့္ပါ။
တခါတေလ
ေဟာဒီ ေတာင္ေျခေတာစပ္မွာ
ရန္သူ႕တပ္ေတြ ငါျမင္ခဲ့။
ေန႕ အခါ
ရန္သူဟာ မိဆိုင္းေတာင္အၿမီး
ဖြတ္ၿမီးထိုးၾက
မိဆိုင္းေတာင္ေျခဖ်ား ဓါးနဲ႕လွီးၾက။
ညေနၾကေတာ့
ဒန္အိုးဒန္ခြက္ ၾကက္၊ ၀က္၊ ဘဲနဲ႕
ထမိန္ အကၤ်ီမ်ားကို သယ္ေဆာင္ကာ
ျပန္လာခဲ့ၾက။
မိဆိုင္းေတာင္ေျခ ငွက္ေပ်ာစုမွာ
လူထုဆီက လုယူခဲ့သမွ်
ေ၀စုခြဲၾက။
ၿပီးေတာ့မွ တပ္စခန္းေတြဆီ
ရင္ေကာ့ၿပီး ျပန္သြားၾက။

က်ံဳစိန္ၾကဳိး၀ိုင္းၾကီးထဲမွာ
လူတကိုယ္စာ အိပ္ယာငယ္မ်ား
ေတာစပ္ေခ်ာင္းေဘး
ေမာင္းေထာင္းသံမ်ား ဆိတ္သုန္းသြားေပါ့။
ေဖၚမဲ့ေတာင္ကုန္း
ေတာင္ယာေတာျပဳန္း ေယာင္ထံုးေတြေျပ။
ေတာႀကီးမ်က္မည္းထဲက
မယ္ဒလင္သံထဲမွာ
ဘုရင္တပါးရဲ႕စည္းစိမ္မ်ိဳး
“ဘီသိုဗင္” ရဲ႕ သုခုမပိုး
ႏိုးၾကားပင့္သက္
ငါ့ ႏွလံုးသားထက္ ဆူးခက္ခ်ဆြဲ။
“ေဘာသျပဳ” ေတာင္ေပၚမွာ
“ကေမာ့ကဆုိင္း” ေတာင္ေပၚမွာ
ေလဟာ
ယုန္တေကာင္ခုန္သလို
ကဆုန္ခ်ၿပီး ေရာက္လာတတ္ရဲ႕၊
အမိ်ဳးအမည္မသိ
ပန္းရနံ႕မ်ားက သီခ်င္းဆိုလွ်က္။

“ဆံပင္ရွည္မထားရ
ႏႈတ္ခမ္းေမႊး မထားရ
ပုဆိးုစလြယ္မသိုင္းရ”
ထူးျခားတဲ့ အမိန္႕စာတရြက္
ငါ့ လက္ထဲမွာ ... ။

ေကာက္သူမဲ့ အင္ဖက္ေတြ
အထက္နီ ေအာက္နီ
တေတာတေတာင္လံုးနီ။

ငါ
စေကာႏွစ္ခ်ပ္စာ
ကၽြဲဲလူးအိုင္ ေရတခြက္
ၿမိန္ယွက္စြာေသာက္ ဗိုက္ေမွာက္ၿပီးအိပ္စက္ခဲ့။
ဒူးရင္းပြင့္ေတြ
ေလထဲမွာ
ဆိုနင့္ကြဲေၾကြ ေျမျပင္ထက္
သက္ဆင္းလာၾကေပါ့။

ညက
လေရာင္မွန္ကြဲ
ငါ့အသည္း၌ စိုက္၀င္စူးခဲ့။
လေရာင္တခု မွန္ကြဲတစ
ဘ၀တခုထက္ ၿမိန္ရွက္ခ်ိဳျမ
“ေမာ္ပါဆြန္း” ရဲ႕ လေရာင္ည။
အခ်ိဳးအဆ
လွပစြာေပါင္းခ်ဳပ္
တစတစ ရုပ္သိမ္းသြားတဲ့ငွက္သံေတြ
ငါေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနမိ။
ပန္းတပြင့္
ငွက္တေကာင္
ေလွာင္အိမ္တခု ျမစ္တစင္း
သီခ်င္းတပုဒ္
ဧကဒုကၡ အထီးက်န္ဘ၀
ညကို ငါေၾကာက္ခဲ့။
ငါ့အသည္းမွာ
ကဗ်ာတေၾကာင္းနဲ႕ ေပါင္းစပ္ျပင္ဆင္
ရွင္သန္အားခဲ ဇြဲခပ္ထားမိ။
ဟိုးအေ၀းဆီမွာ
ေတာင္ယာမီးစြဲ အေမွာင္ထဲ
ရဲရဲစူူးစူး ဖူးၾကပြင့္ၾက။
ေလအသုပ္မွာ ေတာအုပ္အလည္
ေခ်ငယ္ေဟာက္သံ
ေက်ာက္နံရံေခ်ာက္ထဲ
ေပါက္ကြဲစင္က် ညကိုရိုက္ပုတ္
တုန္လႈပ္သြားခဲ့။
အေမွာင္ထဲမွာ မၾကာခဏ
သစ္ရြက္ေျခာက္ေတြ
ေလသင့္တဲ့အခါ ေၾကြက်သြားၾက။

အိပ္မက္ထဲမွာ
“ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေဒၚမၾကည္” ကိုေတြ႕ရတယ္။
မီးခိုးအူေနတဲ့
ပိုင္ရွင္မဲ့ ႏွမ္းတပံုကိုေတြ႕ရတယ္။
“ဆာအိဂ်ိဳး” ရဲ႕
“ေျခာက္ျခားဘြယ္ညေန” ကို
ျဖတ္သန္းရတယ္။
မီးေလာင္ေနတဲ့ ႏွလံုးသားေပၚ
အနမ္းေတြနဲ႕ တက္ခဲ့တယ္။
ငါ့ရဲ႕ ေရႊငါးၾကင္းတေကာင္ဟာ
သူ႕အတြက္ ငရဲတြင္းတခုျဖစ္ခဲ့တယ္။




(၃)

အို “ဒံုသမိေခ်ာင္း”
သင့္ဦးေခါင္းမွာ စကား၀ါပန္း ဆင္ျမန္းထားတာ
ငါသိတယ္။
သင္ဟာ
ရာဇ၀င္သစ္ကို ခ်စ္တဲ့
သံလြင္ျမစ္ရဲ႕
သမီးငယ္တပါး ဆိုတာ ငါသိတယ္။
စစ္ေတာင္း
ခေပါင္း
ေပါင္းေလာင္း
ႏွစ္ေပါင္းေထာင္ခ်ီ
ကမၻာတည္သမွ်မွာ
အမႊာညီအမပမာ ငါသိတယ္။
သင့္ရဲ႕
ျမစ္ကမ္း ျမစ္၀ွမ္းေတြဟာ
ေသဆံုးသြားၾကရတဲ့
ဘိုးဘြားေတြရဲ႕ သခၤ်ဳိင္း ေျမဆိုတာ
ငါသိတယ္။
သင့္ရဲ႕ လက္ေမာင္းေပၚက
ေတာင္ေစာင္း ေတာင္ကုန္းေတြမွာ
ဗံုးဆံတစနဲ႕
ေၾကမြေနတဲ့အရိုးေတြ ဖံုးေနတာ
ငါသိတယ္။
ကံ်ဳစိန္ ႀကိဳး၀ိုင္းႀကီးဆိုတာ
တေထာင့္တည နတ္ဆိုးကိုဆံုးမ
အဓမၼေခတ္ က်ဆံုးခန္း
အနာဂတ္ေျခတလွမ္း
ပန္းတို႕ ပြင့္ရာ
ကဗ်ာ ... ... ... ။

တကယ္ေတာ့လည္း
“ဟပ္သလိုက္ေက်းနယ္” တခုလံုးဟာ
ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။
ဖလံေတာင္ရြာသူ
“မေရသူ” ရဲ႕ ငိုရိွဳက္သံဟာ
ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။
“ကေမာ့ကစိုင္း” ေတာင္ထက္က
ေအးစက္တဲ့ေက်ာက္တံုးတခ်ိဳ႕ဟာ
ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။
သံလြင္ျမစ္ေၾက ေလွသမၺာန္ေတြပၚက
ေနေရာင္ျခည္ဟာ ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။
ပါးရိုက္ခံရတဲ့ သူႀကီးမ “ေဒၚေစာၿမဳိင္” ဟာ
ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။
လူသူတိတ္ဆိတ္
အိပ္ေပ်ာ္သြားၾကရတဲ့ ရြာကေလးေတြဟာ
ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။
ဖလံေတာင္ရြာ စာသင္ေက်ာင္းထဲက
“အသံအက္သြားတဲ့ေခါင္းေလာင္းကေလး” ဟာ
ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။
“က်ံဳစိန္” ရြာထိပ္က သစ္ပင္
ရြာ၀င္နတ္စင္
“ေနာ္ေအာလာ” အေရွ႕ဖက္က လယ္ကြင္းျပင္
ျမင္ျမင္သမွ်ဟာ ကဗ်ာတပုဒ္ျဖစ္တယ္။

“ေမာင္လြမ္းဏီီ” ေရ
ဒါေတြကိုလည္း
ဘယ္သူျငင္းမလည္းလို႕ ေမးစမး္အုန္းပ။ ။

၁၈၊ ၂၊ ၁၉၉၃
ေခတၱ - သထံုခရိုင္

Magical Mountains
(A Traveler's Epic)

1.
Koel ,
An early bird,
Pushes open the shut-doors of the world
With her songs,
Along the rays of a new day’s sunlight.


I…
At the top of the rock,
Where I hid and slept last night,
Sunlight showers gracefully and willowy,
With the color of stark blood-- oozing out all over the mountains.
I watch the morning and
See it as an affable poem.

I observe and sense jasmine,
In the sound of cattle-bells,
Which rise to me from the bottom of the mountain.

I wonder where the foot-path of the Salween starts and ends,
Amidst the dirty-white smog,
Hovering along the blue mountain ranges.

I see the hell-flowers of Baudelaire ,
In the fire which sprouted from volcanoes,
Located on the other side of the world.

The hell-flowers,
Which are beautiful like fire and
Burst loud in the silent night,
And then the injured spirits of his poem,
Fly wildly towards me.
2.
How long has the “Mee-Seng mountain”
Pretended to be fast asleep?

He, eventually, has ascended from the floor of the ocean and,
He, eventually, has rid himself of dirty mud,
He, eventually, has gulped many springs of sweet water.
He, eventually, has ceased the toil of some and allowed them to rest on his shore and
He, eventually, has conceived people in his womb.

Now he, the Mee-Seng mountain, has become a historic symbol of
Magnificent mother nature, the beauty parlor of the world.

From afar he is seen as beautiful,
But draw closer, and he creates fear.
Then when I touch him,
When I drink his water,
I feel safe and warm,
Like our blood is in a swamp together,
Which makes us near to each other.
Now I am dangling from his neck and singing a song.
Now I am picking flowers from his scalp.
Now I am sleeping on his palm.
When I stand on his forehead,
The forests below look like small shrubs to me.

The landscape far below Mee-Seng mountain,
Spreads flat and horizontal like a painting of "Wyette".
Then I borrow and ride the vehicle from Jules Verne,
To travel, yearning for the future.

The devils flew and jumped down,
To the green coconut forest, located far below.
Then I sense the odor of blood
From the hostile forces’ camp,
Located on the opposite side of the Don-tha-mi river.

Sometimes, I see
The hostile forces,
In the brush at the bottom of the mountain.
During the daytime,
The hostile forces are pig-tailing the extremes of the Mee-Seng and
Slide to the bottom of Mee-Seng.
Then in the evening,
They came back to Mee-Seng, bringing pots and pans, livestock, and clothing,
Whatever they had robbed from the villagers.

The hostile forces shared
The stolen property,
Under the shade of banana-forest at the bottom of Mee-Seng,
Where, with heart-ache, I watched almost daily.

Then they go back to their barracks,
Arrogantly and proudly.

A silent night in the Kyone-Sein forest-reserve,
Where temporary sleeping-beds and
The rest of rice-pestle-bowls are scattered,
Along the small stream,
Where there are the essentials for a war-torn people’s subsistence living.

There are lonely hills,
Bald and dried by slash-and-burn farms,
Like a scalp losing its scattered hairs.

I heard a mandolin’s melody,
In the midst of vast forest,
It felt like a king’s luxury.
Though it awaked my aesthetic inkling,
With Beethoven's beating heart,
Itching and tickling my innards,
Like thorns gripping and dragging my heart.

On the ridge of Baw-tha-byu,
On the ridge of Ka-maw-ka-seng,
The whirlwind comes like hopping rabbits,
Singing along like flowers' scents,
Hardly identified by me.

Prohibition orders from the army,
“Do not wear your hair long,
do not grow a beard,
do not dangle your Longyi on your shoulder. ”
Where in this particular area and
The flyer with strange orders
Came to my hand

I see the falling leaves of Inn ,
Nobody dares to pick them up now,
They are red on top and red underneath,
Turning the entire mountain range into a red beacon.

I, dehydrated by the weather
Drank water from a small pond,
Its circumference a meter,
Then slept gratified.

Durian flowers,
Felled to the ground,
A heart-breaking story.

Broken glasses aglow with the night’s moonlight,
Scattered, they pierce my blossom,
But that might be the night of “Maupassant”,
When broken glass is sweeter than real life.

I watch the bird come home to sleep,
Which beautifully and systematically
Sews and weaves in its song, composition and structure.

I fear the night will be falling,
By solitarily watching
A flower,
A bird,
A cage,
A river, and
A song.
From the experiences, I prepare
To write poem in one day,
And start with a sentence of poem
In my mind.

Far, far away,
Slash-and-burn farms are blossoming with
Rough flowers and
Brightly bold, but in the dark.

When the breeze whirls in the forest,
The sound of the barking deer cries out in the forest and
Vibrates and bursts in the rock-cracks.
That makes it night again, awake and tremor.
Frequently, the dried leaves fall to the ground,
Seemed long on their duty.

I saw “Democracy Daw Ma Kyi”
In my dream.
I also saw an ownerless
Smoked sesame seed collection.
I passed through
Sir Eijoe’s “Haunting Evening”.
I climbed onto the hearts on fire
With kisses.
What for me is a golden fish,
For them is Inferno’s dungeon.

3.
Oh! Don-tha-mi river,
I know you pick up and place Zagawar flowers
On your head.
I know you are a princess of
A new history-loving King Salween.
As Sit-taung,
Kha-baung,
Paung-laung Rivers,
I know you are twin-sister of theirs
For thousands of years,
As long as the world exists.
I know your river-banks and valleys are
The graveyards of deceased grandpas and grandmas.
I know crushed human bones and bombs are embedded
In your shoulders and on your slopes.

I know, the Kyone-Sein forest-reserve is the place,
Like a thousand-and-one nights’ stories,
Where evil is defeated and
Where the immoral era will be terminated and
Where the first step to the future can start and
Where flowers will blossom.
I know where there is the whole poem.

Really, I know
The whole Hut-tha-like village track is a poem.
The cry of Ma Yea Thu,
A village girl from Pha-lam Taung, is a poem.
The cold stones
Upon the Ka-maw-ka-seng range is a poem.
The sunbeam upon the boats
In the lower part of Salween River is a poem.
The village head-mistress Daw Saw Myaing,
Who was slapped by the military soldiers is a poem.
Quietly sleeping,
The village-track hidden in the forest is a poem.
The cracking-bell in the campus of
Pha-lan-taung village school is a poem.
The tree located at the up front of Kyone-Sein village,
The shrine of the spirits on that tree,
And the paddy fields seeing through the Naw-Aw-Lar village are
All poems for me.

Hey! Maung Lwan Ni ,
Shall you ask them again,
as you often do,
“Who can deny these events?”.

Nyein Wai
February 2, 1994
Temporarily in Tha-ton District, Karen State.
Translator’s Note: The poet was a journalist for a resistance radio program of the Burmese opposition, the Democratic of Voice of Burma (DVB) from 1992-1994 and he traveled extensively to the war-torn frontier areas in the Karen State to collect news regarding human rights abuses committed by the Burmese army. He was told many miserable stories by the villagers living in the area. Though he was traveling as a journalist, his poetic instinct was awakened by the beauty of nature and by witnessing the life-and-death struggles of villagers who he met during the trips.
A kind of singing bird, Eudynamys scolopacea.
The Salween is one of the main flee-lowing rivers of Burma and the author frequently uses the river as a symbol of resistance, since most of the ethnic and democracy resistance groups are based along the banks and valleys of the Salween.
Pierre Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a famous French modern poet and the author quotes from the famous poem of his, “The flower of Evil” published in (1857-1861).
The poet wants to refer the classic prophetic novel of Jules Verne, "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865), a story which depicts a machine which travels to the moon. The story was written a century before the flights of the astronauts.
Sarong, worn by Burmese men and women.
Inn is Burmese name of broad-based tall timber tree yielding reddish, resinous wood. Botanical name: Dipterocarpus tuberculatus. People collect leaves of Inn tree for constructing thatched roofs, packing, and other purposes.
Sesamum indicum
The poet quotes from a poem of the Russian Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, namely “Cloud in Pants”. Mayakovsky wrote “Look out with your boots, Messrs, firemen,
hearts on fire should be handled with caresses!”
Champac, magnolia, Michelia champaca.