older now
than my mother when she died
I put my hair up!
as if this morning I am leaving
alone for a strange country
haha no yowai
harukani koete
yuu kami ya
ryuuri ni mukau
asa no gotoki ka
Akiko Baba's work is simultaneously reflective and daring, personal and universal. This tanka is a good example: it is a coming of age poem, capturing that moment in a woman's life when she realizes she is in uncharted territory. She will have to find her own way.
For more than half a century, Akiko Baba wrote tanka, the traditional Japanese form comprised of 31 syllables divided into lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Baba's work is well-known and highly regarded in Japan, but little known in the U.S. Hatsue Kawamura and Jane Reichhold, her translators and fellow tanka poets, have done us a great service by sharing 100 of her poems selected from 16 collections. I was especially pleased that they included the original Japanese, both in Romaji (shown in this post) and the original Kanji/kana.
The Romaji allows non-Japanese readers to appreciate the lyricism of the originals, and through her imagery, Baba lets the natural world speak to human concerns. She sounds many themes in these tanka: loss, loneliness, fierce independence, understanding that the universe is much bigger than we know.
coming from afar
from another galaxy
some souls
are faintly white
dogwood flowers
ginkan no
kanata yori kishi
tamashii no
honokani shiroki
yamabooshi no hana
Emily Dickinson wrote that the test of a good poem is whether it takes the top of your head off. Baba's tanka can generate that kind of visceral response. This one takes my breath away.
like snow
like leaves of a tree
as light as
the click click of collecting
the bones of my mother
yuki no yooni
konoha no yooni
awakereba
sakuri sakuri to
haha wo sukueri
In Japan cremation is customary. But fire is not absolute, as Baba reminds us. She shows us ashes in the snow, the leaves, both images of regeneration. And with the click click sound of chopsticks, we understand it is for the survivors to retrieve what remains, to honor and remember. It is an extraordinary tanka.
