Origin

Through darkness they came, covered in ash, scarred by depths and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming at edges of decks, hands clutching railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel, trunks pulled by hand,Where are you from? I unwrapped my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha from my grandfather, ancient as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor of carp centuries old.What are you? Not only where they were from but who they were and would become. His strange past and the mystery of my own face,American? this question flawed as we all appeared, my grandfather's birthplace the half of me I lightened, bleaching my black hair to reach my girlfriend Amber's blonde. In her candlelit room, I touched the mission photo of her rubbing ointment on the burns of a hibakusha. Where are water-filled troughs and the horses' manes my grandfather combed. The hay he bundled in twine,you from? Could he have smoothed names engraved in granite, the scars on the woman's skin, targets raised on maps? In a light blast What are a city of nips was erased,you? A blank scape,Go back no trace of his childhood farm in Hiroshima,to where I turned away from the chalkboard scrawled with Enola Gay,you are a button pushed, from a bomb dropped, at Amber's picnic they bowed over grace, and I looked up, didn't say Amen. Everything rises when the ground's skin is broken.