[W]e bury the ashes
of our wording […]
The narrator describes how there is a need for closure after the offerings have been destroyed—broken, melted, swallowed. The narrator suggests that, in the aftermath of this destruction, we must bury our sorrows and forget our wonderment. In other words, she urges the readers to treasure the memory of the offerings, of the beloved items, but to suppress thoughts of what could have been. In many ways, this stanza is a call of sorrow, one in which all musings about and thoughts of the offerings must be buried, so as to avoid further sorrow.
[Y]ou must stop everything gently
wait for seven long years
under a sky of whirling wheels [...]
In this stanza, which nearly concludes Kogawa’s poem, the narrator describes the aftermath of a terrible and tragic car accident. In the previous lines of the poetry, the narrator has described the splintering and shattering of car windows—the aftermath of a terrible accident. Here, she explores the purgatory-like state that occurs after a terrible accident. In this state, she explains that everything simply stops. The victims of the accident are in limbo for—according to Kogawa—seven long years. This could possibly refer to a victim falling into a coma, where they are alive, but in a purgatory-like state, one where they are both awake and asleep. This is likely the “sky of whirling wheels” that the narrator describes.
[I]f your mirror bnreaks into
a tittering sound of tinkling glass
and you see the highway stretch into
a million staring splinters […]
In this stanza, the metaphorical meaning of this poem becomes more clear. We learn that the “mirror” that the narrator has been describing is representative of the windshield of a car. In this stanza, it becomes clear the narrator is describing a car accident. Author Joy Kogawa utilizes a very particular and masterful use of misspelling in line 1, where she intentionally misspells “breaks” as “bnreaks.” This simple grammatical mistake exemplifies the chaos and disorder that is a car accident. She describes the tittering sound of tinkling glass, which is meant to represent the ironically gentle sound of glass breaking into millions of pieces. This subsequent destruction, as Kogawa describes, distorts the passengers’ views of the road. The fragments of glass appear to splinter the highway into a long stretch of glittering asphalt.
[W]here there's a wall
there's a way
around, over, or through […]
This poem, which encapsulates Joy Kogawa’s experience at a Japanese internment camp during World War II, begins with musings of escape. In this way, this poem’s exposition perfectly demonstrates the atmosphere of desperation that Japanese prisoners must have felt during their time at internment camps. Here, author Kogawa speaks of the desperation to find an escape, a flaw in the camp’s system. As a result, these opening lines help to instill in the reader an understanding of the prisoners’ intense desire to find a way out of their prison during World War II.
