Occasional touches of lyricism remind the reader that poetry springs from the humblest and most unlikely settings — for example, Jeanne's perception that
It is so characteristically Japanese, the way lives were made more tolerable by gathering loose desert stones and forming with them something enduringly human. These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete. Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep.
Such metaphoric witnesses to will symbolize a universal truth about human endurance — as the adage advises, they turn lemons into lemonade by evolving methods of enduring out of the simplest media. To pass idle time and ease frustrations, Ko and other heads of household arrange stones into patterned walks as though paving from bedrock a handmade path to a new life. In this assertion of creativity lies hope that Manzanar is a brief stop along a greater, more significant passage.
