Through darkness they came,
covered in ash, scarred by depths
and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming
at edges of decks, hands clutching
railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,
trunks pulled by hand, Where are you from? I unwrapped
my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha
from my grandfather, ancient
as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor
of carp centuries old. What are you?
Not only where they were from but who they were
and would become. His strange
past and the mystery of my own face, American?
this question flawed as we all
appeared, my grandfather’s birthplace the half of me
I lightened, bleaching my black hair
to reach my girlfriend Amber’s blonde.
In her candlelit room, I touched
the mission photo of her
rubbing ointment on the burns
of a hibakusha. Where are
water-filled troughs and the horses’ manes
my grandfather combed. The hay he bundled
in twine, you from? Could he have smoothed names
engraved in granite, the scars on the woman’s skin, targets
raised on maps? In a light blast What are a city
of nips was erased, you? A blank scape, Go back
no trace of his childhood farm
in Hiroshima, to where I turned
away from the chalkboard scrawled
with Enola Gay, you are a button pushed,
from a bomb dropped, at Amber’s picnic
they bowed over grace, and I looked up, didn’t
say Amen. Everything rises
when the ground’s skin is broken.
