WEBVTT

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Kubota writes to
Vallejo about hope.

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Chances are your photo floats
on a gaseous light in my memory,

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a black and white I saw
one day in an old newspaper

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wrapped around some
canned beef from Paraguay

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that came to my store when
I was a free man in 1938.

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The article said you died
in Paris on a rainy day

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as you had predicted.

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And that you had cried out
for Spain and its freedom

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from your deathbed.

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I cried too, Cesar.

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For your chin and
your right hand.

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For your high forehead
cresting to the thick,

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dark hair combed straight back.

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For your eyes
squinting in worry.

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For the furrows of your brow.

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Although handsome,
dressed in a Spanish suit,

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no doubt brought from Madrid
when it was the only thing

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you owned.

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You look metaphysical.

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I would say, peacefully anxious.

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Perhaps about to speak of hope.

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How its shadow has no dark.

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How its bold front has no
face to thank with kisses.

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If I bring you to my dark cell,
Cesar, to this bleak plateau,

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you have sworn to me you
would give off no light.

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And if I were to bring you
out into the sun with me,

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when guards allow us to exercise
with the ball in the desert

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or play jump rope
like schoolgirls,

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you have said you will cast
no shadow at sunrise or either

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late in the day.

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What is pain that
is so deep in you

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it never had a cause, Cesar.

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What if your hunger walk
somewhere so far from pain,

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one blade of grass at least
would sprout from your grave?

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I understand, of
course, that we do not

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suffer as Catholics or
Mohammedans or as atheists.

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That if you were not Vallejo,
you would still feel it.

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That if you were not a
man, you would feel it.

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If you were not Catholic, or
an atheist, or a Muhammadan,

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you would still feel it.

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I too am in pain.

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It comes from deeper down.

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My pain comes from my
scholar of a father who

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stained his white hands with
wet earth and burdock root,

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rubbing the juice and
mud over his hands

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at the House of thousands.

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This is a name from one
of the detention centers.

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So he would be taken
for a sturdy farmer

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and granted his ticket
to step from Sand Island

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into the kingdom of heaven.

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A frail man, he was so sick he'd
only eaten water on the way.

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Detained in the harbor, he
slept in a muddy grass house

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eating taro and fish for days.

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Weeping when he saw the sunrise.

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Sobbing when a
barefoot woman passed

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by his hut hauling a load
of grain in a bundle on her

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back as if it were a baby.

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My pain comes from the day
the Hawaiian king arrived

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and ordered them all
into a double line

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so he could pass between
them, stretch out

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both his hands to touch fingers
and palms with each Japanese,

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welcoming the Imin to
do the work of cane.

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To earn the wages of
sugar, the white stone.

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I am in pain from
this further down.

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I am in pain.

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I see your pain, too,
while at work, keeping

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accounts on the
estate in Peru when

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workers arrived by
thousands in the courtyard

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below your balcony.

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You tallied with the
black stone the profit

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of each one who
worked the sugarcane.

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From the fistful of rice
they took home, you felt it.

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And from the pennies they
ate, they were in pain.

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There are in life
such hard blows.

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We don't know.

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Blows from Black
messengers who hit

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us hard with a stick and heart,
also, with the end of a rope.

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And when we turn
our eyes around,

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when a patting falls upon our
shoulder, we know nothing.

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And they take us to the North
wind and to the South wind

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and return to us pain
that has not a cause.

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That is a thing so
important it never had

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a cause, born all on its own.

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We don't know.

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The witnesses are Thursdays
and the bones of our arms.

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We do not feel the suffering
together, Cesar, but alone,

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along dark roads.

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A black stone lying
on a white stone.

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Not as Kubota am I in pain.

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Today, I am simply in pain.

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