THE VISITOR

Alone, I came to this world
without company.
Empty handed, nothing to show
just a breathing body.
Alone, I will leave this world
without company.
Empty handed, nothing owned
but a lifeless body.
From the cradle to the coffin
all along the way,
attachments thickly spun and
acts, endlessly played.
Here a smile and there a tear
wrapped in sensation.
Melt in love or boiled with fury
dancing to temptation.
Now it is dark and fate beckons
to bid all "adieu".
So let us part and in haste
onwards continue.

(Translated from a Myanmar general epitaphic verse printed on fans distributed to those attending a funeral).

(From Poems On Death)

မူရင္း ျမန္မာ ဓမၼသံေ၀ဂ ကဗ်ာ

ဧည့္သည္

လာတံုးကလဲ၊ တစ္ေယာက္ထဲေနာ္၊

လက္တြဲေခၚကာ၊ ေဖာ္မပါဘူး၊

ဥစၥာခ်ည္းႏွီး၊ ကိုယ္ထီးတည္း။

ျပန္သြားေတာ့လဲ၊ တစ္ေယာက္ထဲေနာ္၊

လက္တြဲေခၚကာ၊ ေဖာ္မပါဘူး၊

ဥစၥာခ်ည္းႏွီး၊ ကိုယ္ထီးတည္း။

လာျပီးေတာ့နား၊ မသြားေသးခင္၊

ခ်ိန္ေလးတြင္မွ၊ ၀န္းက်င္းယွက္ႏြယ္၊

ေႏွာင္ၾကိဳးသြယ္ၾက၊ ျပံဳးရယ္မဲ့ငို၊ ခ်စ္မုန္းပိုၾက။

မလိုေဒါသ၊ လိုေလာဘႏွင့္၊

ဘ၀ရိပ္ျမံဳ၊ ကၾကိဳးစံုခဲ့၊

ကံကုန္မိုးခ်ဳပ္၊ လက္တြဲျဖဳတ္ကာ၊

သုတ္သုတ္ေဆာလ်င္၊ ခရီးႏွင္သည္၊

တို ့လ်င္ ဧည့္သည္ပါတကား။