Re-Entry
For Ben
You enlist, a U.S. Marine,
serve four tours in Vietnam,
bear its baggage of horrors.
Returning home, battle weary,
veteran of an unpopular war,
there are no victory parades for you,
though you wear a purple heart –
Semper Fi.
Following your discharge
you drift out of marriage,
alienate your son,
develop a spotty employment record
until you reinvent yourself,
discover canaries.
Beginning with a male and female,
you become proud owner of a flock.
Next you have a schedule:
a regimen of feeding, watering, grooming,
breeding and culling delicate song birds.
Your garage, an aviary,
full throated with melody.
In winter males sing to court a female.
In spring, it's nesting and babies.
Summer, birds molt.
Fall brings the Canary Fanciers show.
You are there for them.
Eventually your birds
win recognition,
sought by other breeders.
Canaries fill your life with hope,
an outlet for your intensity,
a healing.
For Giichi Matsumura
Forced from your home in Santa Monica
to Manzanar, a place of desolation
where tumbleweeds roll in the wind,
rabbit bush burns yellow,
sand is carried into every crack
of your tar paper covered wooden barrack home,
where for reasons you never understood,
you lived with four other families.
How difficult it was with no privacy,
to huddle in winter cold, suffer in summer heat,
avoid scorpions as you traveled through the camp,
the indignities you endured.
Not surprising, you hiked with friends in July, 1945,
up the treacherous trail with your watercolors
and rice paper to capture natural beauty
you admired from camp, in spite of your captivity.
Ito, your wife, feared for you, urged you not to go.
A sudden storm came. You fell. You never returned.
Your friends looked for you, but found nothing.
As the ghost of Manzanar you never got to see
your four children mature and thrive.
For seventy-five years you lay entombed by rocks,
until hikers found your skull.
Only then were your remains buried
with Ito who died before you were found,
a lock of your hair and nail clippings resting with her.
At your final burial, with your wife Ito
far from the site of your imprisonment
you were honored, as interwoven threads of incense
drifted north toward Manzanar,
as if to purge the sorrow of the past.
What If?
you carried your own light –
bioluminescence – packed
in the bright suitcase
of your body?
Personal lumens sparkle
a path before you
into dark forest of uncertainty,
a night cave of chaos,
or the dim light mesopelagic,
twilight zone of fear.
Imagine personal radiance
that candles
through the murk, attracts
others into your glow,
defeats gloom –
a perpetual shining.
Lynn M. Hansen, a retired Modesto Junior College professor of marine biology, is a member of the Ina Coolbrith Circle, a charter member of the Modesto Stanislaus Poetry Center and past president of National League of American Pen Women, Modesto Branch. Her work reflects her sense of place and the art of story-telling. She enjoys gardening with native plants, photography, cooking and writing. Her published work includes Flicker, Poems by Lynn M. Hansen by Quercus Review Press (2013), Journey to Sky Avenue: The Life of Mernie Daisy Lewis (1882-1963) a self-published historical novel (2022), In the Presence of the Moai: Poems and Prose of Travel. Pen Women Press (2023). She has two Pushcart Nominations.
For Ben
You enlist, a U.S. Marine,
serve four tours in Vietnam,
bear its baggage of horrors.
Returning home, battle weary,
veteran of an unpopular war,
there are no victory parades for you,
though you wear a purple heart –
Semper Fi.
Following your discharge
you drift out of marriage,
alienate your son,
develop a spotty employment record
until you reinvent yourself,
discover canaries.
Beginning with a male and female,
you become proud owner of a flock.
Next you have a schedule:
a regimen of feeding, watering, grooming,
breeding and culling delicate song birds.
Your garage, an aviary,
full throated with melody.
In winter males sing to court a female.
In spring, it's nesting and babies.
Summer, birds molt.
Fall brings the Canary Fanciers show.
You are there for them.
Eventually your birds
win recognition,
sought by other breeders.
Canaries fill your life with hope,
an outlet for your intensity,
a healing.
For Giichi Matsumura
Forced from your home in Santa Monica
to Manzanar, a place of desolation
where tumbleweeds roll in the wind,
rabbit bush burns yellow,
sand is carried into every crack
of your tar paper covered wooden barrack home,
where for reasons you never understood,
you lived with four other families.
How difficult it was with no privacy,
to huddle in winter cold, suffer in summer heat,
avoid scorpions as you traveled through the camp,
the indignities you endured.
Not surprising, you hiked with friends in July, 1945,
up the treacherous trail with your watercolors
and rice paper to capture natural beauty
you admired from camp, in spite of your captivity.
Ito, your wife, feared for you, urged you not to go.
A sudden storm came. You fell. You never returned.
Your friends looked for you, but found nothing.
As the ghost of Manzanar you never got to see
your four children mature and thrive.
For seventy-five years you lay entombed by rocks,
until hikers found your skull.
Only then were your remains buried
with Ito who died before you were found,
a lock of your hair and nail clippings resting with her.
At your final burial, with your wife Ito
far from the site of your imprisonment
you were honored, as interwoven threads of incense
drifted north toward Manzanar,
as if to purge the sorrow of the past.
What If?
you carried your own light –
bioluminescence – packed
in the bright suitcase
of your body?
Personal lumens sparkle
a path before you
into dark forest of uncertainty,
a night cave of chaos,
or the dim light mesopelagic,
twilight zone of fear.
Imagine personal radiance
that candles
through the murk, attracts
others into your glow,
defeats gloom –
a perpetual shining.
Lynn M. Hansen, a retired Modesto Junior College professor of marine biology, is a member of the Ina Coolbrith Circle, a charter member of the Modesto Stanislaus Poetry Center and past president of National League of American Pen Women, Modesto Branch. Her work reflects her sense of place and the art of story-telling. She enjoys gardening with native plants, photography, cooking and writing. Her published work includes Flicker, Poems by Lynn M. Hansen by Quercus Review Press (2013), Journey to Sky Avenue: The Life of Mernie Daisy Lewis (1882-1963) a self-published historical novel (2022), In the Presence of the Moai: Poems and Prose of Travel. Pen Women Press (2023). She has two Pushcart Nominations.
