For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
The ghosts in the burning city of our time ...
For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten
By the skilful boys, the boys with the rubber fists,
—Held down and beaten, the table cutting their loins,
Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking
Like a headless hen’s on the floor of the slaughter-house
While they brought the next man in with his white eyes staring.
For those who still said “Red Front!” or “God Save the Crown!”
And for those who were not courageous
But were beaten nevertheless.
For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth
Quietly in the hall,
Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time
And kill the guard in the privy before they die,
Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning.
For those who carry the scars, who walk lame—for those
Whose nameless graves are made in the prison-yard
And the earth smoothed back before morning and the lime scattered.
For those slain at once. For those living through months and years
Enduring, watching, hoping, going each day
To the work or the queue for meat or the secret club,
Living meanwhile, begetting children, smuggling guns,
And found and killed at the end like rats in a drain.
For those escaping
Incredibly into exile and wandering there.
For those who live in the small rooms of foreign cities
And who yet think of the country, the long green grass,
The childhood voices, the language, the way wind smelt then,
The shape of rooms, the coffee drunk at the table,
The talk with friends, the loved city, the waiter’s face,
The gravestones, with the name, where they will not lie
Nor in any of that earth. Their children are strangers.
For those who planned and were leaders and were beaten
And for those, humble and stupid, who had no plan
But were denounced, but grew angry, but told a joke,
But could not explain, but were sent away to the camp,
But had their bodies shipped back in the sealed coffins,
“Died of pneumonia.” “Died trying to escape.”
For those growers of wheat who were shot by their own wheatstacks,
For those growers of bread who were sent to the ice-locked wastes,
And their flesh remembers their fields.
For those denounced by their smug, horrible children
For a peppermint-star and the praise of the Perfect State,
For all those strangled or gelded or merely starved
To make perfect states; for the priest hanged in his cassock,
The Jew with his chest crushed in and his eyes dying,
The revolutionist lynched by the private guards
To make perfect states, in the names of the perfect states.
For those betrayed by the neighbors they shook hands with
And for the traitors, sitting in the hard chair
With the loose sweat crawling their hair and their fingers restless
As they tell the street and the house and the man’s name.
And for those sitting at table in the house
With the lamp lit and the plates and the smell of food,
Talking so quietly; when they hear the cars
And the knock at the door, and they look at each other quickly
And the woman goes to the door with a stiff face,
Smoothing her dress.
“We are all good citizens here.
We believe in the Perfect State.”
And that was the last
Time Tony or Karl or Shorty came to the house
And the family was liquidated later.
It was the last time.
We heard the shots in the night
But nobody knew next day what the trouble was
And a man must go to his work. So I didn’t see him
For three days, then, and me near out of my mind
And all the patrols on the streets with their dirty guns
And when he came back, he looked drunk, and the blood was on him.
For the women who mourn their dead in the secret night,
For the children taught to keep quiet, the old children,
The children spat-on at school.
For the wrecked laboratory,
The gutted house, the dunged picture, the pissed-in well,
The naked corpse of Knowledge flung in the square
And no man lifting a hand and no man speaking.
For the cold of the pistol-butt and the bullet’s heat,
For the rope that chokes, the manacles that bind,
The huge voice, metal, that lies from a thousand tubes
And the stuttering machine-gun that answers all.
For the man crucified on the crossed machine-guns
Without name, without resurrection, without stars,
His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour
With the smell of his many prisons—John Smith, John Doe,
John Nobody—oh, crack your mind for his name!
Faceless as water, naked as the dust,
Dishonored as the earth the gas-shells poison
And barbarous with portent.
This is he.
This is the man they ate at the green table
Putting their gloves on ere they touched the meat.
This is the fruit of war, the fruit of peace,
The ripeness of invention, the new lamb,
The answer to the wisdom of the wise.
And still he hangs, and still he will not die,
And still, on the steel city of our years
The light fails and the terrible blood streams down.
We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
We thought the long train would run to the end of Time.
We thought the light would increase.
Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it.
Now the boar and the asp have power in our time.
Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon’s teeth.
Our children know and suffer the armed men.
Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898 – March 13, 1943)
[American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist]
From Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Benét
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955)
"ဘယာနကဂါထာ"
ဒီကာလဆိုးအတြင္းက
မီးကၽြမ္းျမိဳ ့ေတာ္ၾကီးရဲ့
ႏွိပ္စက္ညွင္းပန္းခံရသူေတြ
ဦးခြံေၾကမြကြဲ ေသြးခ်င္းခ်င္းရဲေနတဲ့သူေတြ
အကာအကြယ္မဲ့သူေတြ
လူသာမန္ေတြ
ဖိႏွိပ္ခံရသူေတြ
မကၽြတ္လြတ္ေသးတဲ့ ၀ိဥာည္ေတြ
အားလံုးအတြက္….။
ငရဲအိမ္ ကိုဦးတည္
ဒလၾကမ္းေမာင္းသြားတဲ့ကားေပၚ ပစ္တင္ခံရတဲ့သူေတြ
(သူတို ့ကို)
ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူ ေတြက ရုိက္ႏွက္
ရာဘာလက္အိပ္စြပ္လက္ေတြနဲ ့ထိုးၾကိတ္
ေျမေပၚလွဲခ် ကန္ေက်ာက္
ခံုေပၚတင္ အသားလွီးျဖတ္
အေၾကာဆြဲဆတ္ဆတ္တုန္
သားသတ္ရံုေျမျပင္ေပၚက ေခါင္းျပတ္ၾကက္လို (ျဖစ္ေတာ့မွ)
ေသြးဆုတ္ျဖဴေရာ္ ေငးေၾကာင္မ်က္လံုးေတြနဲ ့ေနာက္တေယက္ကိုေခၚသြင္း…။
"ၾကြပါခင္ဗ်ာ"…
"မင္းၾတားၾကီးဘုန္းၾကီးပါေစ" ဆိုသူေတြ
ရဲစြမ္းသတၱိမရွိေသာ္ျငား..ရုိက္ႏွက္ႏွိပ္စက္ ခံ သူေတြ
ကၽြတ္ထြက္သြားတဲ့သြားကို ေသြးနဲ ့ေရာ တိတ္တဆိတ္ေထြးထုတ္ခဲ့သူေတြ
သံမဏိေပၚ ေက်ာက္တုံးေပၚအိပ္စက္ခဲ့သူေတြ
အခြင့္ေကာင္းကိုေခ်ာင္း
မေသခင္ ကင္းေစာင့္ကိုသတ္ခဲ့သူေတြ
မ်က္တြင္းအ၀ီစိမွာ မီးေတာက္ေနသူေတြ…
သူတို ့ေတြအားလံုးအတြက္….။
ဒဏ္ရာအမာရြတ္ေတြနဲ ့လူေတြ
ေျခဆာေထာ့နဲ ့ ေနသူေတြ အတြက္
အက်ဥ္းေထာင္၀င္းထဲက အမည္မဲ့ေသတြင္းမ်ား
မိုးမေသာက္ခင္ ေျမျပင္ကိုျပန္ညွိ
ဖံုး ဖိ အုပ္ နင္း ထံုးျဖဴခင္း..။
အလ်င္အျမန္ ကြက္မ်က္ခံရသူေတြနဲ ့
ႏွစ္လရွည္ၾကာ သည္းခံ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ ေမွ်ာ္လင့္
အလုပ္သြား
အသားေလးနဲနဲရဖို ့တန္းစီ
လ်ိဳ ့၀ွက္တိုင္ပင္
သားသမီးပြားစီး
လက္နက္ခိုးသြင္း သူေတြလည္း
ေနာက္ဆံုးေတာ့
ေရေျမာင္းထဲက ၾကြက္ေတြလို သုတ္သင္ခံရ။
လြတ္ေျမာက္ထြက္ေျပးသြားသူေတြ
ႏိုင္ငံရပ္ျခားျမိဳ့ၾကီးမ်ားရဲ့ အခန္းက်ဥ္းေလးေတြမွာေနထိုင္ေနသူေတြ
သူတို ့အျမဲေတြးေနသမွ်ေတြက….
ကုိယ့္တိုင္းျပည္အေၾကာင္း
မ်က္ခင္းစိမ္းေတြအေၾကာင္း
ကေလးဘ၀က ေျပာစကား ဆိုစကား ေတြအေၾကာင္း
ေလသင္းနံ ့ေလးအေၾကာင္း
ေနထိုင္ခဲ့တဲ့အခန္းေလးအေၾကာင္း
ေကာ္ဖီေသာက္ခဲ့တဲ့စားပြဲေလးအေၾကာင္း
စားပြဲထိုးေလးေတြအေၾကာင္း
သူငယ္ခ်င္းမိတ္ေဆြေတြနဲ ့ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့တဲ့အေၾကာင္း
ကိုယ္ခ်စ္တဲ့ကိုယ့္ျမိဳ ့အေၾကာင္း
အမည္ေရးထိုးထားတဲ့ အုတ္ဂူ ကမၼည္းေက်ာက္ျပားေတြအေၾကာင္း
သူတို ့ေသခြင့္မရမယ့္ သုႆန္အေၾကာင္း
သူတို ့ေနခြင့္မရတဲ့ ေျမအေၾကာင္း
ေနာက္ဆံုး....
သားသမီးရင္းေတြနဲ ့ သူစိမ္းျပင္ျပင္ျဖစ္သြားခဲ့ရတဲ့အေၾကာင္း..။
စီစဥ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္သူေတြကိုညွင္းပန္း
မစီစဥ္ ရိုးအသူေတြကိုစြပ္စြဲ
ေဒါသမ်ိဳခ် ဟားတိုက္ခဲ့သူေတြအပါအ၀င္
ေၾကာင္းရင္းမဲ့စြာ အေ၀းမွာ “စခန္းသြင္း”
မၾကာခင္ေတာ့ျပန္ပို ့
အလံုပိတ္ေခါင္းတလားေတြနဲ ့
စာသားတစ္ေၾကာင္းေရး
“အေအးမိ၍ ကြယ္လြန္”…..။
“ထြက္ေျပးရင္းေသဆံုး”..…။
