Poetry by Daniel Niv

             ​ ​Timo Newton-Syms CC



Around the Bell Jar
                                                                 "To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, 
                                                                     the world itself is the bad dream" – Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.

It was August and the sun was burning
with light. It was August and my mother
was hospitalized in a room with other women. 
I found no light there, nor the sun. Was this her life
now? But she was laughing there, making jokes 
with her new friends about their mental illnesses. 
They were all laughing, she was laughing, 
and I should've been laughing but
there were many things by then that should've been 
and never will be. 
It was August and, on my grandma's sunny porch,
I read The Bell Jar to understand my mother. 
It was August, and some other Augusts afterwards – 
my mother is still in a bell jar, and I, 
sticked to the glass yet outside of it, 
still searching for the right words to read 
to understand people like me.  ​

Daniel Niv is a 23 years old writer and a student of Tel Aviv University. Currently, she is double-majoring in Literature and Creative Writing in both Hebrew and English. She writes for Matok & Mar Magazine, got published in Caesura Literary Journal and in Bloom Magazine, and recently won the Bar Sagi Award 2021. 

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