Sadako Kurihara was known as the author of a moving poem about a woman giving birth in the ruins of Hiroshima after the 1945 atomic bombing.

Kurihara was a bomb victim herself, and the poem was published in ``Chugoku Bunka'' (Chugoku culture) magazine, of which she was the editor, in 1946.

The poem was found in a book reprinted in 1981 with the title ``Umashimenkana'' (``We Shall Bring Forth New Life''). It had a subtitle, ``Genshibakudan Hiwa'' (an unknown atomic bomb story).

According to Kurihara, she wrote the poem on the basis of hearsay accounts of how the woman in question delivered her baby after she had been exposed to the bomb's radiation.

The drama unfolded in the basement of the old Hiroshima Savings Bureau, a regional postal savings office, where the pregnant woman and many other bomb victims had taken refuge. She started to have labor pains on the night of Aug. 6.

A midwife was among those present, and she offered her help, saying, ``I will deliver your baby.''

The midwife herself had been seriously injured. She had burns all over her back and out to her left elbow, according to ``Kakujidai-ni Ikiru'' (Living in the nuclear age), a book published by Sanichi Shobo.

The baby was born, but there was no way to give it its customary first bath.

Waiting for the crack of dawn, a person in the shelter with relatively minor burns ventured into the bomb-flattened ``field'' outside and found a heat-twisted washbowl.

The midwife poured some water into the washbowl, and proceeded to clean the baby with water-soaked bits of cloth.

``The mother and baby literally owed their lives to the help of bomb victims,'' the ``Kakujidai'' book says.

The mother is quoted in the book as telling Kurihara years later: ``You gave expression in your poem to the situation in that basement and our sentiments as if you had been there.''

With an extraordinarily staunch spirit, the poet followed an anti-war, anti-nuclear and anti-establishment path after the end of World War II.

Probably what drove her was a sense of mission, symbolized by her poem, about the need to carry on life at all cost.

In the utter darkness that descended on Hiroshima after the bombing, people did their best to bring a new life into the world.

They helped maintain the cycle of life in which a newly born baby seems to take the place of the midwife who died before dawn.

Despite her radiation burns, Kurihara, too, did her utmost to ``deliver'' peace. She died at 92 on Sunday, in the early spring of the year that marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

--The Asahi Shimbun, March 8(IHT/Asahi: March 9,2005)