Naingwae

The Speaking Flower
A flower grew on tropical soil
its petals waxen white,
its centur crimson;
the people knelt
and smelt her
intoxicating fragrance
and then felt
mysteriously - free.

Soon the flower
was transplanted
onto yonder shores,
it blossomed,
sprouted limbs,
swaying in the wind,
it breathed the breeze
of liberty.

One day,
the flower returned;
striking her origina soil
her clours ignited;
from her petals
crimson rose enflamed:
‘even the searing heat
cannot erase the blood
on the street.’

White simply said:
‘I am truth;
how long will they use
brute force
to besmirch me?’

The people in
the tropical garden
hailed the
speaking flower,
but the dour vines
choked and encompassed it,
till it was no longer free.

It plucked the flower
and placed it
in a throttled
bottle-neck vase
and here the flower remained,
for eleven years
seven months
and
twenty-seven days.

It did not wilt,
it did not stint
its words.

Its green stalk spoke:
‘stem the politics of hate
we will forever commemorate
the martyrs of
eight, eight, eighty-eight.’
No one could silence
the speaking flowe!

The vines called her ‘foreign’
certain her luminosity
would irradiate
the soil;
they did everything to foil
her speech.
But to the people
in the tropical garden
by Inya Lake,
she was simply,
Aung San Suu Kyi
- the daughter of democracy.

June 19, 2007 Sagari Chhabra
(celebrating Aung San Suu Kyi’s
62nd birthday while still in captivity)

uprising of 8.8.88 when thousands
were gunned down by the military.

ပံုႏွိပ္ရန္