The
Lost Language of Cranes
Rishma
Dunlop
York
University
Art
by Suzanne Northcott
“The
Lost Language of Cranes II” Suzanne Northcott
The
Lost Language of Cranes
I
For if Hiroshima
in the morning, after the bomb has fallen,
Is like a
dream, one must ask whose dream it is.
Peter Schwenger,
Letter Bomb: Nuclear Holocaust and the Exploding
Word
Reading with my
daughter
the
story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes.
Rachel loves to
tell the story
of
the little Japanese girl who is almost two when
the
bomb
explodes a mile from her home in Hiroshima.
They run, fleeing
to the banks of the River Ota
drenched
by the black rain,
falling,
falling.
When she is twelve
years old,
Sadako
runs like the wind in school relay races
best runner in
the sixth grade, until she falters
her body gnawed
away by leukemia,
Atomic
Bomb Disease.
In the hospital,
her friends remind her
of the Tsuru,
the crane
Japanese
symbol of long life, of hope.
If you fold
a thousand cranes.
they will protect
you from illness,
grant you a
wish.
Sadako tells the
cranes
I will write
peace on your wings
and you will
fly all over the world
Sadako begins
folding,
folding fragments
of newspapers,
discarded
wrappers from her medicines,
making tiny paper
cranes,
folding, folding
Sadako’s
mother writes:
If she has
to suffer like this,
she should
have died that morning
on August 6th.
She watches her
daughter, her
painstaking
folding.
She buys a bolt
of silk fabric
printed
with cherry blossoms,
makes
a kimono to enfold her child.
Sadako’s
small fingers folding,
folding
day after day.
She makes 644
cranes before she dies.
Her classmates
complete her thousand cranes,
place
them in her coffin,
as if her heart
would continue to beat in the paper wings.
Her mother wraps
her daughter
in
the softness of silk,
in
the cherry blossom kimono,
lays flowers in
the coffin with the birds, so that her child
can bring them
with her to the next world.
Sadako’s
mother asks the birds:
Why didn’t
you sing? Why didn’t you fly?
“Cherry
Blossom Kimono” Suzanne Northcott
II
A cemetery
seen from the air is a child’s city.
Carolyn Forché, “The Garden Shukkei-en”
I watch my daughter
and her friends
folding
tiny origami cranes for their class project,
across the kitchen
table.
The paper birds
criss-cross the earth
correspondences
for peace projects,
their
hopeful wings trying to speak
the horrors of
war amidst the cheery optimism
of
chalkboards and classrooms.
The children will
send the paper cranes
in
garlands of a hundred birds each
to the mayor of
Hiroshima,
to
be placed with millions of paper cranes
at the foot of
the Children’s Monument where the stone figure
of Sadako
holds a large
golden crane above her head,
arms
outstretched to the sky.
I watch my children
play and wonder
if
the power of birds will stand strong against
exploding words
and mushroom clouds
against the screams
that reverberate
in
the silence of Hiroshima’s Peace Park.
“Origami Crane” Suzanne Northcott
III
After I noticed
the flash, white clouds spread over the blue sky.
It was as if
blue morning glories had suddenly bloomed…
Testimony of Isao Kita
By the banks of
the river Ota,
where
Sadako used to play in the Garden Shukkei-en,
stands a stone
angel holding an origami crane.
Hibakusha,
survivors who are still
alive
wander
the garden, across the pond
on the Kokoukyo
Bridge, through tea ceremonies
and the blossomings
of plums and cherries and irises.
In the garden,
the silence,
the
insistence of memory, the flash of light,
the burning heat,
the shattering of glass,
everywhere
the cries of children calling for
their
mothers.
Bodies stripped
naked by the
blast,
skin peeling, hanging from fingertips
like cloth, mothers
holding dying children
in their arms,
trying in vain to pluck away
the swarming maggots.
Bones in rice
bowls,
babies
crawling over dead mothers, rooting for
nipples,
seeking milk, their reflections shimmering
like
ghosts.
Against a clear
blue sky, flames of fire
and
then black sticky rain
falling, falling
on trees, on flowers, on rooftops,
on
people, the world turning so black
it could not be
washed off.
“Black Bowl” Suzanne Northcott
IV
…Somewhere
slow
poetry is being
tender with its alphabet.
Don McKay, “A Morning Song”
Outside my house
the morning sun spills,
gilded
ripples across the bay.
The cranes stilt
across the mudflats.
I wonder what
they know, what we have lost,
these
birds that mate for life.
Sometimes in the
shallow waters of these wetlands,
the
cranes dance,
sending waves
flying, a language of ancient memories,
a language that
teaches us that after grief, it is possible
to
love again,
a music we have
forgotten, such sheer joy.
When the cranes
lift in ascent, cathedrals of wind
rise
in their wingbones,
estuaries of morning
light lifting across continents,
a
white front of radiance,
their cries like
clouds of desire.
After, in the
presence of still waters,
you can rest in
the white light, in the grace of wings.
“The
Lost Language of Cranes I” Suzanne Northcott
***
Section I:
Art by Suzanne
Northcott
“The Lost
Language of Cranes II,” 24”x ,24”
mixed media on wood.
“The Lost
language of Cranes I,” (detail) 12”
x 48,” mixed media on wood.
Epigraph by Peter
Schwenger from Letter Bomb. Nuclear Holocaust
and The Exploding Word.
John Hopkins University Press, 1992. Cited
in Carolyn Forché’s
The Angel Of History, New
York: HarperCollins, 1994, p.72.
Section II
Art by Suzanne
Northcott
“The Lost
Language of Cranes I,” (detail) 12”
x 48,” mixed media on wood.
Section III
Art by Suzanne
Northcott
“The Lost
Language of Cranes I,” (detail) 12”
x 48,” mixed media on wood.
Section IV
Art by Suzanne
Northcott
“The Lost
Language of Cranes III,” 12” x 48,”
mixed media on wood.
“The Lost
Language of Cranes.” An earlier version of
this poem appeared in JCT, Journal of Curriculum
Theorizing, Vol.18, No.1,
Spring 2002, pp.109-115. Segments of this poem were
inspired and informed by Carolyn Forché’s
poems, “The Garden of Shukkei-en,” and
“Testimony of Light” in her collection
The Angel of History, New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
Hibakusha:
The first atomic bomb
used in wartime was dropped in Hiroshima on August
6, 1945, killing between 130,000 and 150,000 people
by the end of that year. The term hibakusha refers to survivors of the Atomic Bomb. Those who survived the bombing
are aging rapidly now after struggling for many
years. Segments of this poem are informed by the
testimonies collected and videotaped by the Hiroshima
Peace and Culture Foundation to commemorate the
International year of Peace in 1986.
Excerpts referring
to Sadako Sasaki’s mother, Fujiko Sasaki,
are based on a letter titled, “Come Back to
Me Sadako,” from Record of Atomic
Bombs in Japan by
Seishi Toyota, Nihon Tosho Center, 1991.
When
Sadako died on October 25, 1955, her classmates
folded the missing paper cranes to make a thousand
and placed them in the coffin with Sadako’s
body. Since then the paper crane has become an international
symbol of nuclear disarmament.
Sadako’s
friends and classmates collected Sadako’s
letters and writings and published them under the
title Kokeshi, after
the name of a doll they had given Sadako in the
hospital. Inspired by this collection and the remarkable
effect Sadako’s story had on others, Eleanor
Coerr wrote the powerful book, Sadako and the
Thousand Paper Cranes,
published by G.P. Putnam in 1993.
Sadako’s
classmates began a national campaign to build a
monument in her memory. It was built to honor all
children who suffered from the devastating consequences
and effects of the atomic bomb. The Statue of Sadako
is also known as The Children’s Monument.
Built in 1958 with donations from school children,
the monument stands in the center of Hiroshima’s
Peace Park surrounded by thousands of paper cranes
from people all over the world. At its base is a
plaque with the following inscription:
This is our
cry
This is our
prayer
Peace in the
world
About the Author
Rishma
Dunlop is a professor of Literary Studies in the Faculty of Education
at York University, Toronto. She is the founder
of a research collective of women artists/researchers
called The Red Shoes Collective. Current research projects include The Language of Her
Bones, an exploration
of the engagement with literature and the arts for
human rights and humanist education. Her ongoing
collaborations with visual artists include exhibitions
of literary texts and art, collaborative publications
and performances. Rishma Dunlop is a poet and fiction
writer whose work has won awards and has appeared
in numerous books and journals. Her books of poetry
include Boundary Bay, (1999, Staccato/Turnstone Press), The Body of My Garden
(2002, Mansfield
Press) and Reading Like a Girl
(2004, Black Moss Press). She
is editor, with Priscila Uppal of Red
Silk: An Anthology of Canadian South Asian Women
Poets (2004, Mansfield Press). Rishma Dunlop is an active
member of PEN Canada (advocacy group for writers’
human rights, Writers in Exile and Writers in Prison)
and she organizes a speaker series at York University
called Writers and Artists Without Borders.
Email: rdunlop@edu.yorku.ca
About the Artist
Suzanne Northcott
lives in the historic village of Fort Langley, B.C.
Mainly self-taught, her work ranges from contemporary
figurative to abstraction. Her work revolves
around an exploration of the nature of boundaries
and what lies between: between self and other,
the material and the subconcious world, or the space
between disparate places. She works mainly
in acrylic on wood or canvas, sometimes in combination
with drawing media and phototransfer. A senior member
of the Federation of Canadian Artists, Northcott
is in demand around British Columbia and across
Canada, teaching creative process and life drawing.
She has guest lectured at Capilano College, University
College of the Fraser Valley and York University.
Her work is widely collected and her awards include
the prestigious Aim for Arts International Show
and this year's Spillsbury bronze medal. Her
collaboration with Dunlop is a continuation of her
fascination with words and image and follows an
earlier project "The Sex Lives of Vegetables,"
with poet Lorna Crozier.
Email: suzannenorthcott@shaw.ca
Webpage: www.suzannenorthcott.com
All images are copyrighted.
Please contact the artist for permission.
