A HEART TURNS
By Haikal Mansor

Sometimes a lamp burns.

Sometimes a heart turns.

Somewhere a child mourns,

In the heartland of Buddhism creed,

Of politicians’ greed

And of extremists decreed.

She is not a dream nor a secret,

She is but a harrowing voice of unjust arrêt,

Coming from the terret,

Forced to wear around her neck

To maintain bullying in check.

She buries her face on her knees

And hides her sorrow in the shadow of her lost pedigrees.

Embossed her in the long list of displaced Rohingya refugees.

She sojourns,

Where a lamp burns

And a heart turns

Against Buddhism compassion,

Rohingya existential confession

And fruitful discussion,

For she cannot look up to the racism-smitten uncourtliness,

She thinks of the loneliness

And of the unloveliness.

She mourns,

Where a lamp burns

And a heart turns.

She sees no promises through the shade of scattering camps

And of triumph of the democratic champs,

Which gives her soul cramps.

She lives,

Through the flashback of torture and persecution that constantly relives

Where a lamp burns

And a heart turns.

From the free bird in the sky,

As flies by.

From the thunder and the storm,

As the cloud that takes the form.

From the dripping water through the holes of her shed,

As the merciless rain bashed.

She finds no norms.

Rather extremism in various forms.

Her wreckage life – a product of political silence,

Of violence,

Of ignorance and intolerance.

As the results of judicial void,

Buddhism compassion devoid

And widespread religious paranoid.

For the smouldering hearts

And thoughts of false-hearts,

She arises in the shadow of her own destiny

With the grain of mutiny,

Against the incompassion,

The oppression

And the depression

Of the turned-hearts

And the stone-hearts.

She arises from the desolate lands

With the honey-voiced tone which beckons her stands.

For the hearts turning against different race,

With gleams like a dream in her face.

Like the grace

And the vision that her parents once embraced

For centuries in Arakan where her linkage is traced.

***dedicated to the millions of Rohingya stranded in the pool of in-compassionate hearts as the results of creed, greed and decreed, and silence, negligence and violence.