Second Coming No. 403 — February 26, 2026
A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by Donald Trump and his fascist regime
Rob Jacques
Nidoto Nai Yoni
On March 24, 1942, the U.S. Army ordered the evacuation of about 250 Americans of Japanese descent from Bainbridge Island, Washington. These Americans were chosen to be the first of 115,000 evacuees on the West Coast because it was thought it would be easier to hunt them down on an island should they attempt to flee. The Americans were given six days to register, pack, sell or somehow rent their homes and belongings. On March 30, these Americans, under armed guard, were put on a ferry to Seattle where they boarded a train to internment camps. They would be closely guarded and not be allowed return home for more than four years.
Let it not happen again,
you making them pack lives into what they can carry,
you watching them like the soldier you aren’t,
your weaponry slung or unslung as the mood strikes,
you whispering, sheepish, docile, actually at fault,
sufficiently indifferent, causing no trouble, saying
“Write me,” “Come back,” “You’ll be fine,”
or “I’ll look after this or that.”
Let it not happen again,
your great silence during spring going down to defeat
in ferries and trains, spring being shipped away
in cartons or draped across laps in wagons
or slipping to dirty floors beside losses lingering long.
Let it not happen again,
those dark places of your own making,
your own devolution from civil to crazed,
those grave imaginings, your heart glazed over,
your soul promiscuous with fear, ears unable to hear
human heartbeats, fingers unable to feel human pulse,
cries of outcasts only a strange language
to you who hear twitterings only,
ambient sophistries of political song.
Let it not happen again,
the unkind blindness of your mind’s eye
unwriting holy writ of human fact and awesome fable,
the Samaritan in you vanquished,
you, yet another failed brother’s keeper,
you, casting out in the end not Cain, but Abel.
Rob Jacques is the author of the poetry collections Dust and Dragons (Fernwood Press, 2023), Adagio for Su Tung-p’o (Fernwood Press, 2019), and War Poet (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in HIV Here & Now, Impossible Archetype, American Literary Review, The Bangalore Review, Windfall, and other journals. Jacques lives on an island in Puget Sound.
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Powerful poem!
This is amazing! Thank you for sharing!