Poetry

CC photo

By

Mark Kodama

The Apple Orchard

A small white headstone marks your grave

Interring your small bones, relics of a distant past.

No one now hears your plaintive cries

That once pierced the quiet valley

In the shadows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Baby Ogata the silence of your bleached bones

Shout at us, reminding us of America’s darker past.

Seventy-seven years ago this month,

American citizens of Japanese descent

Were taken from their homes and herded

Into concentration camps across America.

Red rust circles stain concrete foundations

That once housed the inmates of Manzanar,

Most – like Baby Ogata – American born.

Mark Kodama

Mark Kodama is a trial attorney and former newspaper reporter. He is currently working on Las Vegas Tales, a work of philosophy, sugar coated in meters and rhymes and told though stories. He lives in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area with his wife and two sons.