"Imagination" by Maung Shin Saw

Burmese girl on U Pein Bridge (photo licensed from Shutterstock)

Maung Shin Saw is the pen name of Win Naing, a Burmese poet. His first published poem was "Swae ngin gin (Attraction)" in Yoke shin tay gabyar (Movie Melody) magazine. His publishing credits include Hnin yaik pyar hmaung (Shades of snow in dark blue), a full-length novel; Kyaung galay hnit achar wutto to myar (Little kitten and other short stories); A-yaing du-riya (Savage music), a poetry collection; and K-TV, a poetry collection.

Maung Shin Saw published "Imagination" online on his Facebook page. A video clip of the poet reciting the poem is also published here, recorded by Moe Way, a fellow Burmese poet. 

Imagination

In the soccer field on the edge of our town
She must be waiting for me,
Leaning on a crooked goal post,
Studying the children’s match in progress under the misty raindrops,
With a wave for the flock of blue pigeons
That suddenly spills out of the monastery’s rooftop.
Her eyes are smiling;
Her lips are grieving;
Her tiny hands are clutching and crushing
The green grass blades;
Look!
The glowing red eye on the shoulder of twilight
Is slipping away, disappearing.
Go home, my dear girl!
The bells beckon you from the town.
I, however, shall keep puffing away
The cheroots my mother sent me from back home.

Maung Shin Saw
Translated by Kenneth Wong (October 2016)

စိတ္ကူး

ေမာင္ရွင္ေစာ

ဒို႕ၿမိဳ႕အစြန္က ေဘာလံုးကြင္းကေလးဆီမွာ

ေကာင္မေလး ငါ႕ကို ေမွ်ာ္ေနရွာေရာ႕မယ္။

ရြဲ႕ေစာင္းေနတဲ႕ ဂိုးတိုင္ေဟာင္ကေလးကို မွီရင္း

မိုးစက္မႈန္ေတြၾကားက ကေလးေတြရဲ႕ ကစားပြဲကို ေငးေမာရင္း

ဘုန္းႀကီးေက်ာင္းအို မ်က္ႏွာက်က္ထဲက

ေဝါကနဲ ထပ်ံသြားၾကတဲ႕ ခိုျပာေလးေတြကိုလည္း

ႏႈတ္ဆက္ရင္း၊

ေကာင္မေလးရဲ႕ မ်က္လံုးေတြက ၿပံဳးလို႕၊

သူ႕ႏႈတ္ခမ္းေတြက ေၾကကြဲေနတယ္။

သူ႕လက္ကေလးေတြကလည္း ေျမစာရြက္ စိမ္းစိမ္းေတြကို

ဆုပ္ေခ်လို႕၊

ေဟာ ... ဆည္းစာရဲ႕ေက်ာကုန္းေပၚက

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ေလွ်ာက် ေပ်ာက္ဆံုးသြားပါပေကာ

ျပန္ေတာ႕ ေကာင္မေလးေရ၊

ၿမိဳ႕ကေလးဆီက ေခါင္းေလာင္းထိုးသံေတြ

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