Poetry plays a crucial role in Metal Viper. The poems of Dampa, a baker struggling to find meaning after the 2021 coup in Myanmar, are taped to the wall in front of the display cases of his bakery, for anyone to read. The fresh baked goods going out the door are wrapped in copies of his poems. It is when his shop is raided and Dampa and his 12-year-old son, Vika, were thrown into the dreaded Insein Prison for Dampa’s “seditious poetry,” that the story of Metal Viper begins. After Dampa is disappeared, and Vika is finally released, he meets a poet friend of his father and tells him:
“I want to stay and fight for my father. I want to fight like he did.”
“Your father was a poet, not a warrior.”
“He used to tell me his poems were his rifles and his words his bullets. I will fight with words like him.”
Later in the book, at a clandestine gathering of poets in a house on the back streets of Yangon, two very different poems are read. One by Dampa’s old friend, Salai Zah, and one by Vika which he composed while being held in Insein Prison.
The foul fragrance of hatred (Salai Zah)
The foul fragrance of hatred
Rises out of the pock-marked streets
That once echoed the laughter of children.
No more, their posters tell us. No more.
There are no longer children,
Only fighters for freedom.
The shame of silence
The wretched carcass of cowardice
Vika’s Poem
My father taught me to see the world
the different shades of green
the blue of the sky
The bright orange of the marigold,
The right texture of dough before it’s ready to be bread
The granules of sugar caramelizing
and hardening into shiny glaze
The handprint of flour left on my shoulder when I had made it just right
He taught me to see kindness
How those without shared what little they had
To see caring everywhere
The smile from a cookie
The hug of warm naan
My father taught me
the way words went together mattered
How fewer words became generous
Opening others to see
To touch their hearts
How a poem could change the world
How mixing together a few words
Could make something no one expected
How “I love you” was bigger than hate
I love my father
He showed me the gentleness of tiger the flight of bird above it all
the sweet taste he left us