အေရးေတာ္ပံု ေအာင္ရမည္

(The Determination To Succeed)

The following poem is written by famous Burmese blogger and poet Ma Thadar. A brief translation is done for English readers)

၁၉၆၂ ကစ..
အေမွာင္က်လာတဲ့ ဘဝ
ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားရဲ့ ေရႊေရာင္အိမ္မက္.
လူ ့အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးျဖဴဌက္..
သမဂၢအေဆာက္အဦးနဲ့ အတူ..
ေၾကြက် ေျမခ..
အမည္းေရာင္စ..သမိုင္းရဲ့ မွတ္တိုင္။

(1962 is the beginning of the dark era, when the students’ golden dreams for developing our beloved country had been razed to the ground, together with the Rangoon University Graduation Hall. No one realised then that we were all going to lose our basic human rights too)

ဦးသန္ ့ မွိဳင္းရာျပည့္.
က်ိဴၾကားက်ိဳၾကား..
အေရးေတာ္ပံုမီးစမ်ား..
ေျမ့ေျမ့ေလာင္ဖြဲမီး..
မ်ိဳးဆက္မ်ိဳးစဥ္ တဆက္ျပီးတဆက္
၈၈၈၈ အေရးေတာ္ပံု သို ့
ေသြး နဲ ့ရင္းႏွီးတယ္။

(Many other protests have been organized and held since, such as U Thant’s funeral and 100th Anniversary of Sir Hmine, but all were defeated too. However, these unsuccessful protests were vital and acted as cold fire, which passed on to the next generations, leading up to yet the biggest of all protests – The 8888.)

၁၉၈၈ ေနာက္..
ေက်ာင္းသား တပ္မေတာ္ေပၚေပါက္
တိုင္းျပည္အတြက္ အသက္ေပး
ေသလိုက္ၾကတဲ့ ျပည့္ရင္ေသြး။
လူမသိ သူမသိ..
ဒုနဲ့ေဒး။ အာဇာနည္ေသြးေတြ ..ေျမခေၾကြ။

(The Student Army was formed during the 8888 and thousands of young lives were lost in the battles for freedom and democracy. There were countless Unknown Soldiers and Warriors who willingly gave up lives for the country. It all happened behind the scenes and in secrecy but we all know about their fate because the ground is covered in our martyrs' blood. )

"ခြပ္ေဒါင္းစစ္မွန္..ေလဆန္ကိုသာ ပ်ံမဟဲ့
ခြပ္ေဒါင္းစစ္မွန္..ခြပ္ရင္းသာ ေသမဟဲ့"
ေကသရာဇာ..ဘယ္ျမက္မစားခဲ့
ေဒါင္းစစ္ေတြ က်ဆံုးေသေပ်ာက္
ေဒါင္းေသြးနီနံ..ခုထိမေျခာက္.
ေတာ္လွန္ေရးတစ္ေလ်ွာက္
ဝိညာဥ္မ်ားရယ္..ဒို ့နဲ့အတူတူေန
လြတ္လပ္မွသာ..အမွ်ေဝ
ၾကာခဲ့ျပီေလ..
အႏွစ္ (၂၀)ေျခာက္လွန္ ့အိပ္မက္ေတြ

(Pedigree fighting peacocks would fly against the wind, and would fight until they die. Lions never eat grass. Peacock soldiers died and the smell of their blood is still in the air. Their spirits have marched along with us in all of our battles. Twenty years of nightmares are still not going away. But there will be no memorial service, until we regain the freedom.)

၂၀၀ရရဲ့ ေရႊဝါေရာင္.ေတာ္လွန္ေရး
ေသြးညစ္ေထးတဲ့ သကၤန္း..
သာသနာရယ္ ညစ္ေပႏြမ္းေတာ့..
ေအာ္...ေရႊဗမာမ်ားရယ္..
က်ြန္ျဖစ္ခ်င္ၾကသလား..
က်ြန္သက္ရွည္ရေတာ့မလား။

(2007 saw the Golden Colour Revolution when golden robes got soaked in dirty blood. This time we lost our most treasured religion. Oh dear… Golden Burmese, it looks like you do enjoy being slaves ! Dear Golden Burmese, you are just doing everything to prolong your slavery !)

ကိုလိုနီ မ်က္ႏွာျဖဴကဖ်က္ေတာင္မွ..
ဒို ့ဘိုးဘြားလက္ထက္..မပ်က္ခဲ့တဲ့ သာသနာ
ဒို ့ေခတ္က် မွ သာသနာပ်က္..
ဗမာစင္စစ္က..ဗမာကိုဖ်က္
ဗုဒၶဘာသာဝင္စင္စစ္က..ဗုဒၶဘာသာကိုဖ်က္
ထြီ..ရွက္စရာ့
ရာဇဝင္ရယ္ ရိုင္းပါ့။
မ်က္ႏွာကို ဓါးနဲ့သာ နဳတ္နဳတ္စင္း
က်ြန္ပါး၀ ေသာက္သံုးမက်တဲ့ စာရင္း
က်မနာမည္ လည္း ပါတယ္။
သင္ေရာ..ပါေနသလား.????
သင္ေရာ..ပါခ်င္သလား.?????

We had never lost our religion, the precious gift of our ancestors. Not even during the colonial time. Now only in the junta time, we managed to destroy our priceless traditional culture. Only the Burmese who are destroying Burma ! Only the Buddhists who are destroying the Buddhism ! How shameful is that ? What disgraceful History is that ? There is only one way to save from this historical shame. Just slice your face with a knife. What loyal servants we have all become (to the junta) ? I was one too, who let the country (and the religion) down. How about you ?

ျမက္ပင္ေျခာက္ကေလးတပင္မို ့
အားငယ္မေနနဲ ့
တေတာလံုး ကိုမီးဟုန္းဟုန္းတိုက္မဲ့
ေလာင္စာျဖစ္နိူင္တယ္။

( Do not be lonely , only because you are a little dried grass. That’s all we need to start the forest fire.)

ပုဇြန္ဆိတ္ကေလး တေကာင္မို ့
အားငယ္မေနနဲ ့
သမုဒၵရာ ကိုလူးလားခတ္
ေက်ာ္ျဖတ္နိူင္တယ္။

(Do not feel weak, only because you are a little plankton. They are regularly crossing the oceans.)

အားနဲ ့သာခဲ တြန္းပါလွည့္
ဇဲြမာန္နဲ့သာ..ရုန္းပါလွည့္။
တေယာက္တလက္..စြမ္းအားထက္
မခိုကပ္ရင္..ဘယ္ေလာက္ခက္ခက္
ျပိဳင္တူတြန္းနိူင္ ေရြ ့နိုင္ပါရက္
က်ြန္သက္မရွည္ခ်င္..ၾကိဳးစားပါလွည့္။
ကဲ လာ..ညီညာတူညီ..
ျမန္ျပည္သစ္သို ့ရည္.
အေရးေတာ္ပံု ေအာင္ရမည္။

(Please grit your teeth and push. Please pick yourself up and struggle. Many hands will make one strong force. If we all take part and do our duty, we can conquer anything. If you do not want to live on as a slave , you must try with all your might. Our success only depends on our determination. Let us build Burma as we always wanted – free and democratic. )

မသဒၶါ (၈။၇။၂၀၀၈)

(Nay Chi U's translation)