Two Poems by Romana Iorga
/Weeding
She remembers the color,
the feel in her hand, its weight,
the smell of dry wood.
I watch from the steps of her house.
She fumbles around the yard,
picks up tools like old
postcards, whose sender
has already faded from memory.
Her feet part the thick weeds.
The pile of wrong tools
grows behind her.
It must be the hoe, I tell her.
Did you want to weed your plants?
What plants? She frowns.
Why are you here?
She turns her back to me, enters
the house. I hear her
in the kitchen, clanking pots.
She never lets me cook for her.
I see her in the window,
peeking through the curtain.
Grandma, come outside,
let me open the windows.
She shuts the door, locks it.
All morning I sit on the steps.
The sun leaps over the roof,
burns my skin. Under the eaves,
a swallow feeds its chicks.
Eve to Adam at the End of the World
Across the parking lot, the wind picks up bits of
conversation, twirls them around like empty
plastic bags. Whose fault is this? Mine, yours,
the wind’s? Words are scarce, you once told me.
Their price is steep. One must not forget to
render unto Caesar. We’ve traveled like this for
eons, never arriving, hitched to the cart of our
greatest fear. The invisible whip slices our
rumps faster with each passing decade.
Mornings are spent in anticipation of evenings.
The long nights are mere rehearsals for the
longest one yet to come. And our thoughts? Give
us this day our daily bread is often all we muster
while drinking tepid tea: the brew of watered-
down lives. You pluck half-rotten, discordant
fruit from low-lying branches. I watch the
unbearably beautiful harvest ripen elsewhere, in
someone else’s orchard. Eden burns all around
us, the Eden within us. Its trees are scaly,
reptilian, noxious to touch. So much living and
yet, how uneasy they can still make me, these
nightmarish trees. Forked trunks. Fanged
boughs. Sinuous leaves. Their shadows flick
veined tips across your skin. The mangled light
founders, eddies, its cargo sinking below the
horizon. What have we left to do but watch it
go? But praise the brittle bones of sleep? But
welcome the long winter?
Author’s Note: Both of these poems have to do with some kind of less than grand finale: the slow deterioration of a human life, the fast deterioration of a human world. I’m of an apocalyptic mind these days, given everything that’s been going on at a planetary level and how little we do to stop what now seems increasingly inevitable--our own demise. “Eve to Adam at the End of the World” describes a probable scenario should we not get our act together in time. “Weeding,” an earlier poem, is a harbinger of what’s to come, with a dash of youthful hope. I harbor no illusion about human nature, but I still nurture the hope that nature itself will find a way to survive us.
Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga lives in Switzerland. She is the author of two poetry collections in Romanian. Her work in English has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals, including New England Review, Rust + Moth, Tupelo Quarterly, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.
