Friday, June 29, 2007

The Giving Tree...


by Shel Silverstein

Once there was a tree...
and she loved a little boy.

And every day
the boy would come..
and he would gather her leaves..
and make them into crowns
and play king of the forest.

He would climb up her trunk..
and swing from her branches..
and eat apples.

And they would play
hide-and-go-seek.

And when he was tired,
he would sleep
in her shade.

And the boy loved the tree...very much.
And the tree was happy.

But time went by...
And the boy grew older.
And the tree was often alone.

Then one day the boy came to the tree
and the tree said, "Come, Boy, come and climb up my trunk and swing from my branches..
and eat apples and play in my shade and...
be happy..."

"I am too big to climb and play," said the boy.
"I want to buy things and have fun.
I want some money.
Can you give me some money?"....

"I am sorry," said the tree, "but I have no money.
I have only leaves and apples.
Take my apples, Boy, and sell them in the city.
Then you will have money and you will be happy."

And so the boy climbed up the tree...
and gathered her apples and carried them away.

And the tree was happy...!

But the boy stayed away
for a long time...
and the tree was sad.

And then one day
the boy came back
and the tree shook with joy
and she said, "Come, Boy, climb up my trunk...
and swing from my branches...
and be happy."

"I am too busy to climb trees," said the boy.
"I want a house to keep me warm," he said.
"I want a wife and I want children,
and so I need a house.
Can you give me a house?"
"I have no house," said the tree.
"The forest is my house,
but you may cut off my branches and build a house.
Then you will be happy."

And so the boy cut off
her branches
and carried them away
to build his house.

And the tree was happy.
But the boy stayed away
for a long time.
And when he came back,
the tree was so happy
she could hardly speak.

"Come, Boy," she whispered,
"come and boy."
"I am too old and sad to play,"
said the boy.
"I want a boat that will
take me far away from here.
Can you give me a boat?"
...."Cut down my trunk
and make a boat,"
said the tree.
"Then you can sail away...
and be happy."

And so the boy cut down her trunk
and made a boat and sailed away.
And the tree was happy...
but not really.

And after a long time
the boy came back again.
"I am sorry, Boy,"
said the tree, "but I have nothing
left to give you ...
My apples are gone."
"My teeth are too weak
for apples," said the boy.
"My branches are gone,"
said the tree.
"You cannot swing on them..."
"I am too old to swing
on branches," said the boy.
"My trunk is gone," said the tree.
"You cannot climb..."
"I am too tired to climb," said the boy.
"I am sorry," sighed the tree.
"I wish that I could
give you something...
but I have nothing left.
I am just an old stump.
I am sorry..."

"I don't need very much now,"
said the boy,
"just a quiet place to sit and rest.
I am very tired."
"Well," said the tree,
straightening herself up as much as she could,
"well, an old stump is good
for sitting and resting.
come, Boy, sit down.
Sit down and rest."

And the boy did.
And the tree was happy.

THE END.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Green Field...

...ငယ္ငယ္က ကစားတဲ့ အ၀ါေရာင္ ျမက္ခင္းျပင္ ကိုယ္ေလ တစ္ခါျပန္ေရာက္ခဲ့ရင္း....
အင္း....
ေက်ာင္းတုန္းက ျမက္ခင္းျပင္မစိမ္းတစိမ္းေတြကို သတိယမိပါရဲ့...၊ စိတ္ကူးနဲ့လည္း ခဏခဏ အလည္သြားခဲ့မိတယ္၊ ကုိယ္က ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြနဲ့ အေ၀းဆံုးမွာ ေရာက္ေနခဲ့တာကိုး၊
သတိယစရာေတြ ေျပာမကုန္ေအာင္ရွိေနပါလ်က္နဲ့ဘာလို့မ်ား ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြဆီကိုမွ စိတ္က ေရာက္ေနမိပါ လိမ့္...၊
ဘ၀မွာ မြန္းႄကပ္တာေတြနဲ့ ႄကံုလာရတိုင္း ေပ့ါပါးလြတ္လပ္ျခင္းဆိုတာကို ေတာင့္တမိႄကတာကိုး...ဒီေတာ့ အကာအရန္ အတားအဆီးေတြ ရွိမေနတဲ့ ကြင္းျပင္တရေဟာႄကီးေပၚက စိမ္းလမ္းစိုေျပေနတဲ့.. တခါတေလ လည္း ညိဳ၀ါေရာင္ ေပါက္ေနတတ္တဲ့ ျမက္ခင္းျပင္က်ယ္ႄကီးကိုပဲ လြမ္းေမာတမ္းတမိေနတတ္တာေပ့ါ၊
တကယ္တမ္းက်ေတာ့ ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြမွာ ထူးျခားတဲ့ဆြဲေဆာင္မွဳေတြ ရွိမေနခဲ့ပါဘူး၊ သီခ်င္းေတြ ဇာတ္လမ္း ေတြထဲကလိုလည္း အျမဲတမ္း လွပစိမ္းစိုေနတဲ့ ေနရာတစ္ခုမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ေနာက္ျပီး ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြဟာ ႏူးညံ့ လွပတဲ့ ျမက္ခင္းႏုႏုေတြလည္း မဟုတ္ပါဖူး၊ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြဆီမွာ ရိုးစင္းတဲ့ အရိုင္းဆန္မွဳေတြ ရွိတယ္...လြတ္လပ္မွဳေတြကို ခံစားႏုိင္တယ္...ပိ်ဳျမစ္ျခင္းေတြကို အသက္၀င္ေစႏုိင္တယ္...
ဒါေႄကာင့္လည္း...သတိရစရာေတြ တပံုတပင္ႄကီးထဲက အဲဒီျမက္ခင္း မစိမး္တစိမ္းေတြကိုပဲ တမ္းတမိတာေပါ့၊
.......
ေသခ်ာစဥ္းစားႄကည့္ေတာ့... ဘ၀မွာ လမ္းေလ်ာက္တတ္တဲ့အရြယ္က စလို့ ကိုယ့္အတြက္ ဒီျမက္ခင္း မစိမ္းတ စိမ္းေတြက အေရးပါခဲ့တာပဲ။
ညေနဖက္ေတြဆိုရင္ ခ်စ္တဲ့အေဖနဲ့ လမ္းေလ်ာက္ရင္း... ေလေကာင္းေလသန့္ရွဴရင္း... ကြင္းျပင္ထဲမွာ ေျပးလြားကစားရင္းနဲ့ပဲ... ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြနဲ႕ ရင္းႏွီးခြင့္ရခဲ့တယ္။
အေသအခ်ာ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္တတ္ခ်ိန္ေရာက္ေတာ့... ခ်စ္တဲ့အေဖက အနားမွာရွိမေနႏုိင္ေတာ့ပဲ ကုိယ္နားမလည္ႏိုင္တဲ့ တႏုိင္ငံတည္းကေပၚက လူသူမေရာက္ႏုိင္တဲ့ ေဒသတစ္ခုမွာ ကာလအေတာ္ႄကာ ေလွာင္ပိတ္မိေနေလရဲ့။ အေဖမရွိေပမယ့္ အေဖမိတ္ဆက္ေပးခဲ့တဲ့ ျမက္ခင္းေတြဆီကို ေတာ့ အေရာက္သြားျမဲသြားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အေဖျပန္လာမယ့္ ညေနခင္းတခုကို ျပန္ရဖို႕ေပ့ါ။
ဒီတုန္းက အေဖေျပာျပခဲ့ဖူးတဲ့စကားေတြကို နားမလည္ႏိုင္ခဲ့ေပမယ့္ ကိုယ့္စိတ္ေတြကို ဒီျမက္ခင္းျပင္ စိမ္းစိမ္း ႄကီးလုိပဲ က်ယ္ျပန္႕ႄကီးမားေအာင္ ႄကိဳးစားေနခဲ့မိတယ္...၊
ျမက္ခင္းေတြ ေတာ္ေတာ္စိမ္းေနတဲ့ ညေနခင္းတစ္ခုမွာ အေဖ အိမ္ျပန္ေရာက္လာခဲ့တယ္...အဲဒီေန႕က ကြင္းျပင္ထဲက ျမက္ပင္စိမ္းစိမ္းရွည္ရွည္ေတြ ညြတ္က်ယိမ္းႏြဲ႕ေနေအာင္ကို ေလျပင္းျပင္းေတြ တုိက္ေနတဲ့ေန႕ ေပါ့....။
.......
ဒီလိုနဲ႕ အလယ္တန္းေရာက္လာေတာ့ ကိုယ္ခ်စ္တဲ့ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြနဲ႕ ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြေပၚမွာ
မေရတြက္ႏုိင္တဲ့ ကစားနည္းေပါင္းေျမာက္ျမားစြာကို ကစားခဲ့ရင္း ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ေန႕ေတြဟာ အပူအပင္ကင္းေနခဲ့ျပန္တယ္။ ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ မနက္ခင္းေတြ...ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ ေန႕လည္ခင္းေတြနဲ့... ကိုယ့္ရဲ့ ညေနခင္းေတြကို တနည္းတဖံုနဲ႕ ျပီးျပည့္စံုေစခဲ့ တာလည္း ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြပဲလို႕ဆိုရင္ မွားမယ္မထင္ပါဖူး..။
......
ေဟာ..အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းသားျဖစ္လာတာတဲ့အခါက်ေတာ့... ဒီျမက္ခင္းေတြ.. ဒီကြင္းျပင္ေတြက ပိုျပီး အသက္၀င္လာျပန္ေရာ... သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြနဲ႕ ေဘာလံုးကန္လည္း ဒီကြင္းျပင္ေပၚမွာ... လသာတဲ့ညေတြဆိုရင္ ၀ုိင္းဖဲြ႕ျပီး ဂစ္တာတီးၾကတာလည္း ဒီကြင္းထဲမွာ... တခါတေလ ခိ်န္းျပီးရန္ျဖစ္ၾကတာေတာင္ ဒီကြင္းျပင္ၾကီးေပၚ က ျမက္ခင္းစိမ္းစိမ္းေတြေပၚမွာ...
ေက်ာင္းသြားေက်ာင္းျပန္ ဒီျမက္ခင္းစိမ္းစိမ္းကြင္းျပင္ၾကီးကို ခလုတ္တိုက္သြားေနခဲ့ရတာပဲ... အထူးတလည္ အေရးပါေနခဲ့တဲ့ အရာတစ္ခုလို႕ ဘယ္တုန္းကမွာ မျမင္မိခဲ့ပါဘူး...။
ဒီလိုနဲ႕ အထက္တန္းျပီး...တကၠသိုလ္...။
ျမင္ေနရလြန္းလို႕ မျမင္ခ်င္ေတာ့ေလာက္ေအာင္ ျဖစ္ေနခဲ့တဲ့ ဒီကြင္းေတြ....
တကၠသိုလ္ဆိုတဲ့ အဆင့္ျမင့္ပညာေရးနယ္ပယ္မွာလည္း အမ်ားဆံုးျမင္ေနရတာ ဒီကြင္းေတြပါပဲလား။
ဒီတစ္ခါေတာ့ ျမက္ခင္းေတြအစား စိမ္းစိမ္းစိုစုိ စပါးပင္ေတြစိုက္ပိ်ဳးထားတဲ့ လယ္ကြင္းေတြေပါ့...။
ေၾသာ္...ဒီတုန္းကေတာ့ လူသူမနီးအရပ္ေဒသကို ပို႕ရမလားဆိုျပီး...
ဒီကြင္းစိမ္းစိမ္းေတြကို လ်စ္လ်ဴရႈခဲ့မိတယ္..
ဆက္ရန္...