Poems of Mark Tamthai

Deportee

The boats are all in, and the fish are rotting.
The clothes are piled high on the factory floor.
They're driving him back to the Burmese border.
to hide from the soldiers, then swim back again.

Good-bye to Tun Myint, farewell Lein May Aye.
Take care all my friends, Nyein Chan, Aung Win Thein.
You won't have a name when you ride the big pick-up.
All they will call you will be 'deportee'.

Again and again he waded that river.
They took all the money he made in his life.
It's two hundred miles to the Burmese border.
They chased him like a criminal, just like a thief.

The news screamed silently out from Mae Sot.
Seventeen lives snuffed out like a light.
Whose are these bodies that are floating like dead fish.
The radio said, "they're just deportees".

Is this the best way we can run our big factories?
Is this the best way we can fish our great seas?
To fall like dry leaves, and rot on our top soil.
And be known by no name except deportees.

Good-bye to Tun Myint, farewell Lein May Aye.
Take care all my friends, Nyein Chan, Aung Win Thein.
You won't have a name when you ride the big pick-up.
All they will call you will 'deportee'.
And soon once again you'll be an IDP.

Mark Tamthai -- revised from Woody Guthrie's lyrics about Mexican illegal laborours. Mark wrote the song to commemorate the "mysterious" death of 17 Burmese migrant workers in Mae Sot in early 2002.