Under the Great Ice Sheet

Abstract

Under the Great Ice Sheet Maung Yu Py (bio) Translated from Burmese by ko ko thett and James Byrne Under the great ice sheetA great country has been buried alive.Under the great countryA great church where God no longer shelters.Under the great churchThe great wars, welded together six feet under.Under the great warsA great museum of culture, dilapidated and yellowing.Under the great museumBanknotes without value.Under the banknotesSlaves with protruding bones and sunken eyes.Under the slaveryA Stone Age cave sealed by stones.Under the Stone Age caveRegressive evolution.Under the evolutionThe ocean—the mother of Mother Earth—who died in labor.Under the oceanA great ice sheet, unanticipated.Under the great ice sheet… [End Page 243] Maung Yu Py Maung Yu Py published his first book of poetry, The Bird That Was Killed When the Sky Capsized, in 2000. His subsequent books include There Is a New Map for That Little Island Town Too (2007) and With the Big Television Turned On (2009). His work also appears in Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets. He was arrested in 2021 while attending an anti-coup protest in his hometown of Myeik, in southern Myanmar, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Ko Ko Thett ko ko thett is a bilingual poet and author of several collections of poetry and poetry translations in Burmese and English. He has been featured at literary events from Sharjah to Shanghai, and his poems and translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies worldwide. He was the poetry editor for Mekong Review from 2017 to 2022. His most recent volume is Bamboophobia (Zephyr, 2022). He lives in Norwich, U.K. James Byrne James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. He was the editor of The Wolf, an influential international literary magazine, from 2002 to 2017. With ko ko thett, he translated and edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2013). With Shehzar Doja, he edited I Am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. His most recent poetry collections are Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015) and White Coins (Arc, 2015). He is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University. Copyright © 2022 University of Hawai'i Press