Poetry About Japanese Internment Camps

A numbered tag is tied to the suitcase where a family's address once mattered. Executive order turns ancestry into suspicion and neighbors into absences. Homes, farms, shops, and classrooms are left with little time for farewell. Barracks rise behind wire in dust, heat, wind, and winter cold.

Homes, farms, shops, and classrooms are left with little time for farewell. Some resist the questions designed to measure loyalty after betrayal. Military service does not make the incarceration less unjust. Decades pass before apology and redress enter federal law. Memory keeps asking how fear was allowed to call itself security. A democracy must study the rights it abandoned in its own name.

A numbered tag is tied to the suitcase where a family's address once mattered. Children recite the pledge beneath a flag beyond the guard tower. Families make gardens, newspapers, art, protest, and privacy where they can. Decades pass before apology and redress enter federal law. The paper tag survives in an archive, its string still looped. A democracy must study the rights it abandoned in its own name.