On the Ropes

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Guest editorial column by Burmese poet and activist Ko Ko Thett. The following poem responds to the announcement by Myanmar's military junta on June 3, 2022, that "it would execute four people whose appeals were rejected following grossly unjust closed-door trials." Among the four are activist Kyaw Min Yu, known as “Ko Jimmy,” and opposition lawmaker Phyo Zeya. They were sentenced to death on January 21 under Myanmar’s overbroad Counterterrorism Law of 2014.

On the Ropes
By Ko Ko Thett

In all manners of capital punishment 
hanging is 
the most hideous.

To ancient Greeks
the rope takes away more than life. 
It takes away decency
even in death. 

Had the Romans hanged Jesus
—instead of nailing him on a crucifix—
the Christian church wouldn’t 
have had much impact.

Would you hang around 
your neck an icon of a broken-neck Jesus, 
hanging by the neck 
on a noose?

Be it short drop, pole method, 
standard, or long drop, 
the hanged is condemned 
to indignity.

Once the neck snaps midair 
the body shits and pisses itself,
the eyes bulge,
the tongue sticks out of the mouth, 
if not stuck between the lips, 
bloodied and bitten. 

The Klan loves to lynch their victims.
Only racist hatred justifies the rope.

Hanging cannot be accomplished 
without gravity. 

This makes the innocent earth complicit 
in our human crime—

in its ferity and finality. 


Ko Ko Thett is a Burma-born poet, literary translator, and poetry editor for Mekong Review. He started writing poems for samizdat pamphlets at the Yangon Institute of Technology in the ’90s. After a brush with the authorities in the 1996 student protest, and a brief detention, he left Burma in 1997 and has led an itinerant life ever since. Thett has edited several collections of poetry and translations in both Burmese and English, including Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021. His translation work has been recognised with an English PEN award. Thett’s most recent poetry collection is Bamboophobia (Zephyr Press, 2022). He lives in Norwich, UK.

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