What Remains
They loaded us onto trucks bound for the camps
took our homes, our possessions, our land
just because we were Japanese – Japanese Americans.
Two suitcases were all we were allowed for clothes
photos, keepsakes – twenty years of our lives in America.
Your grandfather was taken right off his fishing boat.
I was cooking the evening meal when they came.
Your mother sat at the kitchen table studying for a test.
That night I cut strips of cloth from garments
I had to leave behind. And from them I sewed this quilt.
Each stitch, a remembrance – each square, rectangle a tribute
to nature’s bounty in the desolation of Heart Mountain.
I stitched in the comfort of kasuri,
the smell of wood smoke on rain-black nights,
of days when rain fell soft and even as my child’s breath.
I stitched in triangles of flowers from my wedding kimono.
And as I quilted, I whispered their names: kiku, hagi, kikyô
chrysanthemum, bush clover, Chinese bellflower.
How cheerful those curtains of plumeria, hibiscus that hung
in our bedroom, their perfume a dream of Hawaii. I sewed in
beauty and vertical rays of yellow, the sun that shone through
the barbed wire and the curtainless windows of our barracks.
The orange poppies were last, fashioned from your mother’s
hair ribbons. I planted them as an afterthought –
question marks blooming with hope.
