April Poem #7: The Gold Kimono

I'm struggling with this one. I like the challenge of writing to prompts, but the only one that spoke to me today is the one from There Is No Pilot: "Select five objects from the room you're in and write a poem in which you recontextualize them - put them in a different landscape, or in a junkyard, or some other place." I was in my bedroom when I read this, a room filled with objects with varying degrees of interest or resonance for me, but it wasn't until I went into my study that I saw something I really wanted to write about, though I think ultimately what it calls for may be a story rather than a poem. My poems have been getting so long lately (except for yesterday)! Five objects? One was challenge enough.

THE GOLD KIMONO

She brought it home from Japan after the war,

after the Occupation. She’d been an army nurse

there, in Yokohama, in the former Swedish

consulate pressed into service as a hospital,

its huge rooms, designed for diplomatic

entertaining, turned into wards.

I grew up on her war stories. Dances

at the officers’ club – all the nurses were officers

and not supposed to date enlisted men.

How she was dancing at the officers’ club

in Mindinao when the band suddenly stopped

playing and a general announced

the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then they went to Japan, where the nurses and WACs

weren’t allowed to go out without a man.

But still she made it sound like a party.

She laughed when she told me about a pilot boyfriend

who took her up in a little plane to buzz

the farmers in their rice paddies.

She brought home souvenirs, elaborately

carved and painted mahogany shower shoes

from the Philippines, whole jungle villages

incised into their wedge heels.

I wore them to play dress-up.

I didn’t know about the kimono.

She gave it to her mother, who put it away

in a cedar chest because it had no obi.

Long years after Grandma died, she gave it to me,

and I put it in my own cedar chest

.

Years after that she told me how she got it,

how her soldier boyfriend asked her if she’d like one.

They were all buying them for their wives

or mothers or sweethearts, and she let him choose one for her,

muted shades of purple silk with ivory streaks

like ripples on water, and chrysanthemums,

purple, gold, and ivory, floating on the water.

People were poor, she said, after the war,

and probably happy to sell.

A Japanese friend showed me how to hang

it from a bamboo rod, on a wall painted

gold to set it off. I look at it and wonder

whose it was, what mother or grandmother

sold it, how long it had been in that family.

As long as in mine, seventy years now?

I would give it back, but to whom?

I will never understand what’s woven in that cloth.

                    - Victoria Stefani (draft)

Comments, please!