Joy Kogawa: Where there’s a wall there’s a way…
Posted: November 11, 2011 Filed under: English, Joy Kogawa | Tags: Remembrance Day poems Comments Off on Joy Kogawa: Where there’s a wall there’s a way…
Where there’s a wall
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
a ladder perhaps and a
sentinel who sometimes sleeps.
There are secret passwords you
can overhear. There are methods
of torture for extracting clues
to maps of underground passages.
There are zeppelins, helicopters,
rockets, bombs, battering rams,
armies with trumpets whose
all at once blast shatters
the foundations.
Where there’s a wall there are
words to whisper by loose bricks,
wailing prayers to utter, birds
to carry messages taped to their feet.
There are letters to be written —
poems even.
Faint as in a dream
is the voice that calls
from the belly
of the wall.
_____
Joy Kogawa was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1935.
This poem is from her 1985 collection, Woman in the Woods.
Kogawa and many other Japanese-Canadians were forcibly removed
from their homes during World War II, and sent to to internment camps
for the duration. Many lost their property and businesses, with no
compensation. This ugly racist chapter in Canadian history – the design of
Mackenzie-King’s government – was brought fully to public attention in the 1980s,
partly through the power of Kogawa’s 1981 novel, Obasan.
Zócalo Poets 