Butte Camp Monument—Arizona

Kenneth Tanemura

Just concrete stubs poking out of the ground

like cactus, what’s left of the internment camp

where my father spent his fifth year in the summer

of 1943. Roadrunners skirmish through

rock, dirt. We drive broken roads to reach the spot

where he lived, behind barbed wire.

Now crushed beer cans litter the barely paved road.

Did they clear the columnar cacti to build

fences, barracks? Hard to imagine cactus bear

white flowers in spring; all protective spine

now in mid-July, thorny as the fences they built

to contain 8,000 Japanese Americans.

He must have woken to low mountain

ranges on all sides, but I can’t imagine

the rows of barracks lined up between saguaro

& scrub. They built the camp on an Indian reservation.

American Indians, he said, greeted him

with a dance, warned of the summer heat.

Gave gifts of watermelon. Welcome,

they said.  To their home which was his

prison for two years. Voices carry

from hilltops here & the Indians loved us

even as the white men didn’t. I can feel

their love here for me, for all of us.

Abdominal clouds net the last of daylight.

Gravel crunches underfoot, echoes a hundred miles.

If nothing happened to us here I’d have written

the song of saguaro, gnarled tree branch.

How small our transport is to arrive anywhere.

We were both here in Arizona, in different worlds.

He was too young to remember Ben & George & Todd

Sakohira drafted out of camp into the U.S. Army,

died in action so we could live passive,

remembering. Even interned Japanese Americans

built Buddhist & Christian churches here,

a high-school, canteen, shoe repair shop,

read the Desert Sentinel, though most Japanese

came from Central Los Angeles.

The Indians granted permission for the building

of this monument—a half-circle inspired

by Ireland’s Stonehenge. Why does recent

American history feel pre-historic? An Indian man

sits where the watchtower used to be, the machine-gunner

who kept my father from leaving.

As if he could have tried. The Japanese

followed along, would have stayed without

the fences & rattlesnakes & the unknown

of each town’s prickly barrel. I hike up

to the watchtower where the Indian man sits

laughing, with a woman. It’s like being

on a big plate & the world served up to me:

horizon, setting sun, smoky grey peaks.

Graffiti says: “Emma + Juan,”

& “I love this woman.”

Back in the car, the slow drive back to 10.

The roadrunners dash into the next

moment’s pause in the brush.