With every “Teacher What Does A Metaphor Mean”, “Teacher What Is Empathy”, “Teacher Am I A Bad Poet If I Only Write About Love”, I realized we all carry poems with us, but we may not always see them, like our backs. We only feel it when someone pats it and reminds us that we always have it to fall on.

As a teacher to 30 ethnically diverse students in Taunggyi, a small town in Shan State, Myanmar, I introduced Spoken Word Poetry as an art form for them to express and explore varied experiences. The students confronted feelings of love, anger, loss, in face of trauma from the past and uncertainty of the future, and wrote poems about the same aided by writing prompts in classrooms. Boys of Burma is a visual representation of the rewarding and challenging experience of being an educator, it was photographed over a span of six months. The project explores vulnerability, identity, representation of masculinity, and brings forth the idea of the personal as political. It is a labour of love, an artistic collaboration between the students and me.