Mitsuye Yamada
Warning*
My father’s voice came to me
from the corner of his cell
marked Dangerous Enemy Alien
Do not sign your legal name
to anything not
on petitions for any cause
in the street
at meetings or rallies
not on receipts for orders
special deliveries or C.O.D.s
I was my father’s daughter
I had followed his advice assiduously
never left my thumbprints anywhere
never gave my stamp of approval
to anything
never cast my soulprint in cement
never raised my voice on billboards
and one day disappeared anyway
behind barbed wires.
They put up a sign on buildings
telephone poles and store fronts
For All Persons Who Never Left a Mark
My silences had not protected me.
*"Warning" appears in Yamada's newest collection, Full Circle: New and Selected Poems and is reprinted in The Ear with the author's permission.
About the Author
Mitsuye Yamada was one of the first and most vocal of Asian American women to write about the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. Diane J. Fujino’s 2020 biography, Nisei Radicals: The Feminist Poetics and Transformative Ministry of Mitsuye Yamada and Michael Yasutake chronicles her life. She lives in Irvine with her family.