LET US BE MIDWIVES!
An untold story of the atomic bombing
by Kurihara Sadako
Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland Libraries
Site Ed. note: This poem was written in free verse form in September 1945 and appeared in the inaugural issue, March 1946, of a local journal founded by Kurihara's husband, Chūgoku bunka (Culture of Chūgoku Region). It is perhaps the first atomic bomb poem to be published in Occupied Japan. It passed American censorship review in the summer of 1946 and was published again in Kurihara's collection of wartime and early postwar poetry, Kuroi tamago (Black Eggs).
In the 1983 unexpurgated edition of the poem, Kurhara provided the date of the poem and added the note: "This poem appeared first in the inaugural issue of Chūgoku bunka (the special issue on the atomic bomb, March 1946). The cellar in the poem was the cellar of the old post office in Senda-machi."
Night in the basement of a concrete structure now in ruins.
Victims of the atomic bomb
jammed the room;
it was dark—not even a single candle.
The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death,
the closeness of sweaty people, the moans,
From out of all that, lo and behold, a voice:
"The baby's coming!"
In that hellish basement, at that very moment,
A young woman had gone into labor.
In the dark, without a single match, what to do?
People forgot their own pains, worried about her.
And then: "I'm a midwife. I'll help with the birth."
The speaker, seriously injured herself,
had been moaning only moments before.
And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell.
And so the midwife died before dawn, still bathed in blood.
Let us be midwives!
Let us be midwives!
Even if we lay down our own lives to do so.
.........................
Reference
Kurihara Sadako. Black Eggs: Poems. Trans. Richard H. Minear. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Center for Japanese Studies, 1994, 67.
|