Fighting Kite (page 14)

This poem in Fighting Kite was orginally written in 1998 for an anthology titled Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, edited by M. Evelina Galang. The backstory of the anthology (described more fully in this blog post) has to do with a 1998 restaurant review in Milwaukee: the reviewer called a Filipino restauranteur's child a "little monkey," setting off an online brush fire of protest by Filipino Americans. Eventually Galang compiled and edited the anthology in reaction and response.         In birdsong my father strolled the Presidio of San Francisco, a Filipino in the U.S. Army, sharp in parade dress, lieutenant's bars riding his shoulders like sun cresting clouds. A corporal in dingy fatigues walked past my father, snickered, kept his right hand by his hip. "Hold it right there, soldier!" my father barked. "Where's that goddamn salute?" The corporal smirked, looked him in the eye and said nothing, but my father could read it in his face — I'll be damned before I salute a little brown monkey who ought to be climbing a fucking tree. My father growled an order. The soldier jerked to attention. My father slipped off his jacket, draped it on a hedge. The rainbow of ribbons reminded him not of crossfire and the soldier he saved on patrol, not of the forced retreat to Corregidor, not of the weeks evading Japanese capture, not even of the Bataan death march, nor of the concentration camp. Instead he recalled the American jeep that tried to run him down in a rainstorm. Get out of the road, monkey! My father said, "You might not want to salute me, young man, but you will salute this jacket, these bars. Do it!" Birds sang. "Again." Sun shone. "Again." The corporal's arm swept the air, a wiper blade trying to swipe brown mud from a windshield.     Page 9 The blog post mentioned above talks about this piece: The poem itself relates a family story. When my father was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco immediately after the war, a soldier on the street refused to salute my father (who had been recently promoted into the officer ranks of the US Army). It was quite clear to Papa that the refusal was racist — the soldier, a white man, was not about to salute an officer who wasn't white. So my father took off his uniform jacket and draped it on a nearby hedge, then ordered the soldier to salute the jacket, affixed with lieutenant bars, again and again. Which the soldier did. My father always told this story as a parable about "thinking out of the box," as we say these days. The photo above is a very small snapshot I have of my father in his US Army officer's uniform, in front of the San Francisco Public Library downtown, in 1946, around the time this event happened. I'm sorry it's blurry . . . there is very little detail in the snapshot itself. In terms of poetic craft, the aforementioned blog post describes how the poem employs pentameter that has been intentionally "roughed up" [in] alternating couplets and tercets (all unrhymed). I have forgotten why I shaped the poem this way, but the pattern does allow me to produce some useful verse paragraphs, for example, stanzas 5, 9, 10, and 11. At the same time, I also get some nice stanza enjambments: "a Filipino in the US / Army," for example, in lines 2-3, highlighting the problems Filipinos encountered during that time, both in the US Army and in US society overall. So, basically,blank verse. In the final stanza above, you can see my use of sound effects. The corporal's arm swept the air, a wiper blade trying to swipe brown mud from a windshield. Alliteration and onsonance in the repetitions of SW and P in "swept" and "swipe"; also assonance in the I vowels of "wiper" and "swipe"; and more alliteration and consonance in the B and D in "blade" and "brown mud"; interestingly, because L and R are related (liquid) consonants, there is also consonance of L and R in "blade" and "brown"; finally, notice as well as the preponderance of Ps and Ds throughout the stanza. Fun stuff! As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.  FIGHTING KITE   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST