Famous poet visits

By Denis Kevans

Famous Japanese poet Taka Iwami visited Australia recently. Her two closest friends are Idi Maruku and Atoshi Maruku, who were the painters of the world-awakening Panels of Hiroshima.

Atoshi and Idi so loved Taka's poetry that they offered to do the illustrations for her first published book. Angels by Taka Iwami, illustrated by Idi and Atoshi, was published in 1993. It has already been translated into Korean, Chinese and English.

Taka uses classical Japanese poetic forms, the tangka and the haiku. But she adds something which Idi and Atoshi call “tsbo-tsbo”, translated as “straight expression”.

Taka was near Hiroshima the day it was bombed. A Chinese friend of hers, Sho Kei Shi, was in the city. Sho Kei Shi is one of Taka's many friends who have succumbed to atomic sickness. She remembers them with a gathered silence and a deep in-flowing dignity.

Taka Iwami is someone you meet and cannot forget. Strong as bamboo, she works for Japan-Australia friendship and the Japan-Asia Friendship Society, which has raised money to dig freshwater wells in a hundred Indian villages.

In Australia, she visited Uluru and met Yami Lester, who was blinded by the black cloud from Maralinga atomic bomb tests. Yami gave her a necklace of wild desert seeds.

I had the pleasure of talking to Taka at Wentworth Falls, and we bush-walked through golden banksia blooms to the Valley of the Waters, one of the wonders of the world. I pointed out to her the outline of a reclining woman, whose limbs stretch out into Jamison Valley and whose inclined head gazes forever at the stars of the southern sky.

“She is our dreaming woman, Taka. She is remembering all of time.” There is a rock fall down her profile which looks like tears.

Soon after she left, Taka's latest poem arrived:
Tears just fallen down,
But not out of sorrow,
Out of joy.

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