Manzanar Poem by Michael Sepidoza Campos

i wrote this on the bus,
on the our return home.
-- Michael Sepidoza Campos

...
Circles.
And more circles.
Words woven among stories.
Anger. Despair. Doubt. Hope.
How does one foster life
In a place of desolation?
In the context of paranoia?

I think of Marjorie.
I think of the many prayers.
Silences offered. Quiet tears shed.
Attempts to hide years of feelings.
Shame still persists.
Shame of what?

Vulnerability. Weakness.
Stoicism in the face of dehumanization.
Stoicism as a response to shame.
I will be as a rock, unmoved.
Even as I am stripped.
Even as I am shamed.

I think of the gardens.
Fruits of one's anger. Spaces of defiance.
Dispelling the paralysis of fate.
Stoicism bearing life.
Where one chooses not to be unmoved.
Where one effects life upon land.
Upon barrenness. Lifelessness.

How does one breathe
While suffocating beneath fear?
How does one see
Beyond the veil of dust storms?
How does one hear
Bereft of community?
Families that foster love?

How does one live?

But life persists. Is relentless.
Where terrain, though desolate
Channel a people's spirit to hope deeply.
To see beneath the veneer of discomfort.
To claim life upon a land that has both
Spat and embraced them.

There is stunning hope here.
There is gratitude from which I draw life.

I the foreigner. The stranger.
Encounter the voices of our common ancestors.
And I learn to see with their eyes.
Hear with their ears.
And so hope as deeply.

I am grateful.
I stand in paths of circles.
Enveloped by voices of intersecting stories.
And so, I am ennobled by a humanity
That stands fundamentally the same,
A common grounding upon life.
Of circles. Of cyclical immersions
In life and death.
Between hope and despair.
Circles. Circles. Circles.

--
Michael Sepidoza Campos
Interdisciplinary Studies
Graduate Theological Union
Berkeley, CA

---
Read more reflections by the pilgrimage participants.

Podcast: Manzanar reflections by seminarian Shelley Page

Podcast of Starr King student Shelley Page as she reads the poems she wrote in response to her pilgrimage to Manzanar, a California relocation camp where the U.S. government held 10,000 persons of Japanese ancestry for three years during World War II.

Read more reflections by the pilgrimage participants.