Like crawling black monsters

the big clouds tap at my window,

their shooting liquid fingers slide

over the staring panes

and merge on the red wall.

Some of the fingers pull at the hinges

and whisper insistently: “Let us come in,

the cruel wind whips and drives us

till we are sore and in despair.”

But I cannot harbor the big crawling black clouds,

I cannot save them from the angry wind.

In a tiny crevice of my aching heart

there is a big storm brewing

and loud clamour and constant prayer

for the reflection of snow-capped mountains

on a distant lake.

Tires and dazed I sit on a bear skin

and timidly listen to the concert of storms.

What kind of thoughts now, do you carry

   In your travels day by day

Are they bright and lofty visions, 

   Or neglected, gone astray?

Matters not how great in fancy, 

    Or what deeds of skill you’ve wrought; 

Man, though high may be his station, 

    Is no better than his thoughts. 

Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly, 

   Let each one an honor be; 

Purge them, scourge them, burnish brightly, 

   Then in love set each one free. 

Nisei, remember the party line?
How you shared the same line,
The same mornings,
The same problems—
My girl is sick, the check was mailed late,
The irrigation pump doesn’t work—
Two hundred for the man to come out.

Life on the nisei family farm… 
If Mrs. Oda lifted the black telephone
And another voice was there,
She set it back into the cradle,
Looked up at the clock,
Maybe folded baby clothes,
Maybe cut coupons from the newspaper,
Maybe ironed a shirt,
Maybe took a broom to the spiders
Near the ceiling.

(Water drip from the kitchen sink,
Tractor roar near the barn,
Dog barking just to bark,
Sunlight hot as an iron on the sill.
She looked at the telephone, looked and looked.)

Mrs. Oda smoothed the front
Of her dress—printed with chickens,
Little white fences, roses faded from the wash.
She could have cooked rice,
Chopped green onions and carrots,
Nappa if one was in the fridge.
Elbows on the kitchen table,
She could have examined her book
Of Green stamps.  

At a quarter to five
She lifted the receiver of the phone.
She called her sister-in-law on the next farm
To say that she had folded clothes,
Ironed and cut coupons,
Swiped the broom at spiders,
And saved the better part of the nappa.

Her sister-in-law would say,
“I did those very things—
Okazu’s for supper.
You could come over
But looks like you’re having the same.”

Where did the shooting stars go?
They flit across my childhood sky
And by my teens I no longer looked upward—
My face instead peered through the windshield
Of my first car, or into the rearview mirror,
All the small tragedies behind me,
The road and the road’s curve up ahead.

The shooting stars?
At night, I now look upward—
Jets and single-prop planes.
No brief light, nothing to wish for,
The neighbor’s security light coming on.

Big white moon on the hill,
Lantern on gravestones,
You don’t count.

Small fellowship of daily commonplace
    We hold together, dear, constrained to go
   Diverging ways. Yet day by day I know
   My life is sweeter for thy life’s sweet grace;
And if we meet but for a moment’s space,
   Thy touch, thy word, sets all the world aglow.
   Faith soars serener, haunting doubts shrink low,
   Abashed before the sunshine of thy face.
Nor press of crowd, nor waste of distance serves
   To part us. Every hush of evening brings
   Some hint of thee, true-hearted friend of mine;
And as the father planet thrills and swerves
   When towards it through the darkness Saturn swings,
   Even so my spirit feels the spell of thine.

¹⁸⁸⁸