STATE LINES
California Poetry
If a stone had a voice, what might it say? In this striking poem, Brynn Saito uses the voice of a stone to tell the story of Manzanar in Inyo County, where more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. The powers of the personified rock allow Saito — and us — a unique perspective of the experience, one made of sensations and whispers rather than the sort of conscious editorializing commonly seen in poems addressing such a troubled historical event. Beyond sensations, the stone seems also to have human feelings. It has more empathy, for example, than the American authorities who built the internment camp to imprison their innocent fellow citizens.
“Stone in the Desert Camp, 1942”
Between the turtle rock and the crane rock the children found me. I was shining and smooth and silent about my secrets. One day above me men with bony shoulders came and built the barracks. Then I couldn’t see the sky for the rising camps and I couldn’t feel the winds, whipping between the ranges; I couldn’t see the ranges. After a short time voices moved in and I heard singing. Months later, dancing. But mostly what caught me was the quiet, concentrated chatter of elders: How long before a working stove? How to make a garden in this cradle of limestone? How to coax a stream from the highest of peaks in the freest of nations, in this nation we sought for the blinding? Some days no one heard the tears but I felt them: they coated me like evidence of a prior sea. I thought: this must be how the humans felt when the rains broke above them every two hundred days and the waters for once didn’t leak through their roofs and they were happy. “Stone in the Desert Camp, 1942” is from “Power Made Us Swoon” © 2016 by Brynn Saito. The poem appears with the permission of Red Hen Press. All rights reserved.
Brynn Saito is the author of “The Palace of Contemplating Departure” and “Power Made Us Swoon,” both from Red Hen Press. She lives in Alameda. David Roderick is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT: A Home for the Literary Arts, in Berkeley. He is author of “Blue Colonial” and “The Americans.”