The Speaking Flower

A flower grew on tropical soil
 its petals waxen white,
 its centre 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 original soil
 her colours 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 flower!

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.