Tim Hunt

As Something Done by Others (Manzanar War Relocation Center)

Here, the photos say, is what we were
when this was done to us: 

The boy with a baseball bat
waits for his friends to gather for a game;

high school kids in band uniforms;

children kneeling to their lessons
on the bench before them
as their teacher leads their recitation—

American Japanese or Japanese
Americans
or Japanese or Americans

or neither.

Let us say internees

because we see this,
see them,
as the past. 

And this we see
as something done by others

who were once us.

Buddhist Temple (Sebastopol, CA. 1964)

In the almost dawn I ride my bike out to the highway
and on to the grocery store where every morning
the truck from San Francisco brings the newspapers
to deliver to the big houses on the hill above town.

Every morning, I pedal and coast—past the orchards, past
the little houses where some afternoons I play with my friends,
and past the church that doesn’t have a cross or steeple.

It sits back from the highway as if it has been
there a very long time—
as if it belongs to the trees that shade it. 

I know it is something called Buddhist Temple,
and that this is where Byron and Randy Okamoto go to church.

I know my father and uncles fought in the war
and that the Japanese were enemies. At school
I play with Byron and Randy. They are Japanese.
They are not enemies, not the Japanese. They are
Byron and Randy, who are Japanese just as I am not.

These are things I do not think about as I bundle my papers
or we sit at our desks or play schoolyard games.
I do not know if Byron or Randy think about them,
or have heard of Manzanar. I have not heard of Manzanar.

I do not wonder about the parents of Byron and Randy
or if they speak of Manzanar. I do not wonder
who, in that time of war, cared for the temple
as it waited in its grove of trees for its people to come back.

 

San-shi-en (Partially Recovered Garden, Manzanar National Historic Site)

            1.
The plaque says this was San-shi-en,
or 3-4 Garden, and in
the tinted photo

the locust trees frame the desert light
as if the glare has stepped back,
hands together and bowing slightly

to honor the water in the pool—
a temporary peace of deepening shade
that is deeper even than the beauty
that was San-shi-en, or 3-4 Garden.

The plaque does not name those who made the garden—
digging out the pond with shovels, skimming
the placed rocks with concrete
to hold the water diverted from the thread of creek.

The plaque does not say who had the seeds
and slips or who nurtured the plantings
into the world of the tinted photo
that says this was not Manzanar,

says this is San-shi-en, or 3-4 Garden.

            2.
In this place that was
San-shi-en, or 3-4 Garden,
the locust trees—twisted
trunks and leaves—
still filter the desert noon,

and one can sit on a metal bench,
enameled Park Service green,
sipping tea from a thermos, studying
the now dry stones and patches of concrete
partly recovered from the sand.

The water must be imagined, the ferns
and flowers imagined.

The stepping beyond Manzanar into San-
shi-en, that too must be imagined,

as if the eye might hear the echo
of what was and how it was
to be,

a moment, in San-shi-en—

that temporary beauty within
Manzanar that was not Manzanar—

for a time within the timeless,
or perhaps timeless within time.

 

 

Tim Hunt’s six collections include Western Where and Voice to Voice in the Dark (both Broadstone Books) and Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes (winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award). Originally from the hill country of northern California, he and his wife Susan live in Normal, Illinois.