Out of this history is what I write.
My poems.
A recent cycle of poems.
So, excuse me.
Here we go.
So I'll just read the first one.
And I apologize for those of you who've heard it before.
Have you all heard it, by the way?
No.
So I can inflict it upon those of you who've already.
In these poems I take the voice of my grandfather writing
about his feelings of being wronged.
But he's also reaching out to poets
who have inspired him to endure, to 我慢,
as they say in Japanese.
And he may not himself have known of these poets.
I happen to have.
So I decided that he would know them.
And I just sort of pretend that he would know them.
The poets are Miguel Hernandez, the great poet of the Spanish
Republic who was incarcerated by the fascists from 1939,
and then who was killed in prison in Alicante.
Also, Nazim Hikmet, the great Turkish poet
who was incarcerated by the Turkish military,
the Chinese poets of Angel Island,
the Peruvian poet Cesar Barrio, who is
put in prison for making fun of the plantations.
They had sugar plantations in Peru, too.
And then Kubota reaches out to poets of great humanity
and [? released ?] Tadeusz [INAUDIBLE] the Polish poet
of post-war reconstruction in Poland after World War Two,
Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel laureate,
and finally to Charles Olson of Gloucester, Massachusetts,
the poet of Maximus.
Anyway, this is Kubota to Miguel Hernandez in heaven, Loop,
Arizona, 1942, right after he's put there.
The sun travels slowly from over the top of this Adobe stockade.
And when I finally wake and pull my face to the bars
at my window, I see a gray light filling
in the shadows between the mess and guard quarters
and among river stones and the sides of the central well.
Horses snort and whinny far off from the corral I cannot see,
and a line of burros shuffles by led by a single Navajo dressed
in khaki colored clothes from the trading post.
I've been here two months now.
To name the hill surrounding this plateau of pinion Pines.
Words I learned from the guards and other prisoners,
Japanese like me swept up in the days
after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The guards won't say what our crime is, rarely address us,
but I overhear them sometimes saying
the names of mountains, nearby towns, complaining about food
and us Japs.
They won't say if we'll be let go.
The interrogators come every few days and ask about our hobbies
back home.
Studying poetry, working the shortwave radio at night,
and me, how I go out night fishing
for kumu at Cahokia Point.
What landed me here was I used to go
torching, wrapping the kerosene soaked rags on bamboo poles,
sticking them into the sand inside the lagoon,
and then go light them with a flick from my Zippo.
The fish come in from outside the reef, schooling
into the light, and me, I catch enough to feed
my neighbors, Pierogi, Hawaiian, Chinese, and all,
eating good for days after like New Year's in early December.
For this, they say I'm signaling submarines offshore,
telling the Japanese Navy the South Southwest route to Pearl.
That's a lie.
They ask when.
I tell them.
They ask where.
I tell them.
How many fish?
I tell them same every time.
No change my answer.
But how can you transform sorrow into poems, Miguel?
To think of your wife and infant son with only onions
to eat while you sing your lullabies
from your cell in Alicante.
Is it cold for you, Miguel, with only the dark
to wrap yourself in?
It is warm, even hot here on Navajo land
in Northern Arizona, where your poems
are sent to me in the moon's sweet silver light
as it rises over the Mongolian Plateau these summer evenings.
They say that your sentence was death for writing poetry,
that you celebrated the Republic and the commoners.
I celebrated only my family and the richness of the sea.
My sentence, therefore, is only eternity to wait,
not knowing, imagining everything, imagining nothing.
My wife taking in boarders, doing her laundry and sewing,
my children growing more trivial by the day,
without word where I have been taken,
whether I will be returned or simply
have vanished into the unwritten history of our country.
The suffering tells me to be patient, Miguel,
to think of your song of sweet onions
lulling your baby even in his hunger to a peaceful sleep,
or the wars of our time and their ignorant ministrations
go on shedding their black, tyrannical light
into the future.