For today
I have to build a railroad
piece by piece
and hours of work
still so many left

- by Gennadiy Stepanenko, age 19




[Editor's note: The above poem comes from a high school Language Arts "Oregon History Through Literature" unit. After learning about the experience of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in Oregon, starting in the late 1800s and spanning all the way through World War II, youth wrote poetry, taking on a fictional identity and describing life through the lens of a Japanese American person in Oregon.]