A Rice Cake At Midnight Poem by Donal Mahoney

Midnight in San Francisco.
Yoshiko is 93
and she can't sleep
so she sits in her recliner

and nibbles on a rice cake,
sips cold tea, and thinks
about her parents who died
in flames in Nagasaki.

She came on a boat to live
with her aunt in San Francisco
and still wants to know why
they bombed Pearl Harbor.

She used to ask her aunt
and the teachers at school
but no one would ever say why.
She will ask until she dies.