Iris Dan 

  

Iris Dan was born in Bukowina, Romania, in a family of Holocaust survivors. She grew up bilingual (German and Romanian), than studied Romance languages at the University of Bucharest, graduating with an M.A. in linguistics. She has been living in Israel since 1980. She is married, has a grown daughter, and works (quite happily) as a translator from and into a number of languages. From her (existential and professional) Babel Tower she sees the Mediterranean. She has written poetry for as long as she can remember, never publishing any, in the last 15 or 20 years in English only. Recently she has begun to send her poems on their own way and has been published or is forthcoming in the Voices Israel Anthology, Magnapoets, Poetic Portal, Subtletea, and Poetic Diversity.

The following works are copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  

Falling

Falling
through my lungs
through the narrow conical shaft
onto the seedless grass where the self
copulates with the universe

No kinder, gentler wolves around
turned vegetarian, and no
state-of-the-art weaponry
recycled as agricultural equipment

Just endless rows of fig trees
(equally seedless)
and under each of them

a white man
deprived of his burden
sitting
in perfect hormonal balance
with not as much as
an itch in his loin.

  

The Clove

Pungent, the clove
Points through the cottony,
Chalky, compressed
Smell of sterility,
Awakening, numbing,
The most perversely
Potent aphrodisiac

Again I sit
Giving in to it
In a waiting room
As, in another climate
I sat in yours
Waiting for
My share of comfort
My share of applause

No, I won’t go back
To myself, my red coat,
Fluffy white hat
Or to you, smelling of
Antiseptic and clove
Opening your door
Your arms to me

I’ll stay with the clove
Reassuring, the thought:
It was there, I was there,
And, up to a point,
You were there too.

  

Ancient Languages

Archaic languages should be grafted into you
before you  become too set
in your linguistic ways.
After such time, you may have problems.

You will, supposedly, come to terms with the idea
that God is a noun in the plural
and His forbidden name a verb
in the eternal present tense.

It is the pleonasms that make you bristle.
In all the advance forward and ascend up
you see the everyday madness reside.
You resist them at first, then give in to their charm

and begin to advance for- (or, in this language,
east)ward, until you reach a point where
you have to spend yourself building a wall
to stop your own demented progress

descend down to successive hells
Orpheus couldn’t have known about
ascend up the kabalistic vortex
at the center of which God keeps trying

You try all this, you walk in either direction
on the cosmic Moebius strip
otherwise known as Jacob’s ladder
finally settling below its lowest rung

making your peace with language
on the ground of vacillating sanity
where angels fear to lower their feet.

  

A Cave of One’s Own

There she sat crouching by the fire,
the aging female,
among her peers,
the stronger, the younger,
the ones blessed with better teeth,

watching them devouring the freshly hunted food,
the blood, the juices, the spittle
trickling down their chin,
she barely munching,
trying, instead,
to recognize her sons and her daughters
as well as the males with whom she had once mated,

listening to the sounds they were making,
watching the young males displaying their swollen,
red-bluish manhood,
the young females displaying their pointed rumps,

scratching her head
and the floor of the cave
in search of words
that would give meaning
to hunger
to lust
to the pain of birthing,
to the colors  beyond the smoke,
beyond the walls of the cave,

trying to understand
why the roof of the cave
sometimes seemed to fall down on her
and looking for a suitable word.

Dreaming, at times,
of a cave of her own,
where she could,
near a more civilized fire,
pursue her search.

Finding it, one day,
the secret, blessed cave,
lighting her own, secret, sacred fire,
sitting there for hours,
not really safe, for safe she was never,
but at least free from disgusting sights and sounds,

awaiting, awaiting
an illiterate message from the outside
signifying nothing
but giving her an idea for a new word or two.

And when words failed her,
she raised herself,
scratching the walls with sharp stones,
with her brittle claws,
coloring them with her blood,
and leaving around her skeleton
a realistic - untruthful scene
representing a peaceful juxtaposition
of the males with whom she had mated
or to whom she had given birth
and of the beautiful animals
she herself was guilty of having eaten.