Annette Sisson: “Under a White Moon”
UNDER A WHITE MOON
A daughter, now eighty-two, spends
a decade grubbing in dirt, unburying
the transplanted roots of her life.
She returns to this place, searches for roses—
Granada War Relocation Center,
rocky, once covered with chain-link,
barbed wire, seven thousand
Japanese-Americans fenced away
like nightshade. After Pearl Harbor,
her mother took a cutting from her lost
grandparents’ rosebush, stashed it
into a satcheru, under a slim volume
of Bashō, a hand mirror inlaid
with mother of pearl—tokens to fuel
dreams of pagodas, lotus blossoms imperial
as kabuki. At the camp the mother waited
for the moon’s white shine, planted
the shoot while the guards slept—wormed
her way out of the hammock to a patch
of land with thicker soil, dug the hole
with a borrowed spoon and pearl handle.
Now, eight decades later, the daughter
finds one pink bloom, a bud
on a small bramble, petals drawn
tight as a pill bug—she remembers
the dusty corners of the wire enclosure,
sees her mother’s hands grafting roses,
hears her whisper to the stems’ nodes:
It’s the roots that save; push them deep.
Annette Sisson has had poems appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust and Moth, Citron Review, Lascaux Review, Typishly, One, and many other journals. Her book, Small Fish in High Branches, was released by Glass Lyre Press in May 2022—her chapbook, A Casting Off, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. She was a Mark Strand Scholar for the 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a 2020 BOAAT Writing Fellow.