Margaret Atwood: Poems

Biography of Margaret Atwood

a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.

A Sad Child
You're sad because you're sad. It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep. Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet. Take up dancing to forget. Forget what? Your sadness, your shadow, whatever it was that was done to you the day of the lawn party when you came inside flushed with the sun, your mouth sulky with sugar, in your new dress with the ribbon and the ice-cream smear, and said to yourself in the bathroom, I am not the favorite child. My darling, when it comes right down to it and the light fails and the fog rolls in and you're trapped in your overturned body under a blanket or burning car, and the red flame is seeping out of you and igniting the tarmac beside you head or else the floor, or else the pillow, none of us is; or else we all are.

Margaret Atwood

More and More

More and more frequently the edges of me dissolve and I become a wish to assimilate the world, including you, if possible through the skin like a cool plant's tricks with oxygen and live by a harmless green burning. I would not consume you or ever finish, you would still be there surrounding me, complete as the air. Unfortunately I don't have leaves. Instead I have eyes and teeth and other non-green things which rule out osmosis. So be careful, I mean it, I give you fair warning: This kind of hunger draws everything into its own space; nor can we talk it all over, have a calm rational discussion. There is no reason for this, only a starved dog's logic about bones.

Margaret Atwood

Habitation
Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder: The edge of the forest, the edge of the desert the unpainted stairs at the back where we squat outside, eating popcorn where painfully and with wonder at having survived even this far we are learning to make fire

Margaret Atwood

A Visit
Gone are the days when you could walk on water. When you could walk. The days are gone. Only one day remains, the one you're in. The memory is no friend. It can only tell you what you no longer have: a left hand you can use, two feet that walk. All the brain's gadgets. Hello, hello. The one hand that still works grips, won't let go. That is not a train. There is no cricket. Let's not panic. Let's talk about axes, which kinds are good, the many names of wood. This is how to build a house, a boat, a tent. No use; the toolbox refuses to reveal its verbs; the rasp, the plane, the awl, revert to sullen metal. Do you recognize anything? I said. Anything familiar? Yes, you said. The bed. Better to watch the stream that flows across the floor and is made of sunlight, the forest made of shadows; better to watch the fireplace which is now a beach.

Margaret Atwood

Morning in the Burned House

In the burned house I am eating breakfast. You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast, yet here I am. The spoon which was melted scrapes against the bowl which was melted also. No one else is around. Where have they gone to, brother and sister, mother and father? Off along the shore, perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers, their dishes piled beside the sink, which is beside the woodstove with its grate and sooty kettle, every detail clear, tin cup and rippled mirror. The day is bright and songless, the lake is blue, the forest watchful. In the east a bank of cloud rises up silently like dark bread. I can see the swirls in the oilcloth, I can see the flaws in the glass, those flares where the sun hits them. I can't see my own arms and legs or know if this is a trap or blessing, finding myself back here, where everything in this house has long been over, kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl, including my own body, including the body I had then, including the body I have now as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy, bare child's feet on the scorched floorboards (I can almost see) in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts and grubby yellow T-shirt holding my cindery, non-existent, radiant flesh. Incandescent.

Margaret Atwood

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worse suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most.

This, and the pretence that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slab of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meanings are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mother was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look--my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

Margaret Atwood

Flying Inside Your Own Body

Your lungs fill & spread themselves, wings of pink blood, and your bones empty themselves and become hollow. When you breathe in youll lift like a balloon and your heart is light too & huge, beating with pure joy, pure helium. The suns white winds blow through you, theres nothing above you, you see the earth now as an oval jewel, radiant & seablue with love. Its only in dreams you can do this. Waking, your heart is a shaken fist, a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in; the suns a hot copper weight pressing straight down on the think pink rind of your skull. Its always the moment just before gunshot. You try & try to rise but you cannot.

Margaret Atwood

Backdropp Addresses Cowboy

Starspangled cowboy sauntering out of the almostsilly West, on your face a porcelain grin, tugging a papier-mache cactus on wheels behind you with a string,

you are innocent as a bathtub full of bullets. Your righteous eyes, your laconic trigger-fingers people the streets with villains: as you move, the air in front of you blossoms with targets

and you leave behind you a heroic trail of desolation: beer bottles slaughtered by the side of the road, birdskulls bleaching in the sunset.

I ought to be watching from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront when the shooting starts, hands clasped in admiration, but I am elsewhere. Then what about me

what about the I confronting you on that border you are always trying to cross?

I am the horizon you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso I am also what surrounds you: my brain scattered with your tincans, bones, empty shells, the litter of your invasions.

I am the space you desecrate as you pass through.

Margaret Atwood

maddy_1975@yahoo.co.in Is/Not
Love is not a profession genteel or otherwise sex is not dentistry the slick filling of aches and cavities you are not my doctor you are not my cure, nobody has that power, you are merely a fellow/traveller Give up this medical concern, buttoned, attentive, permit yourself anger and permit me mine which needs neither your approval nor your suprise which does not need to be made legal which is not against a disease but agaist you, which does not need to be understood or washed or cauterized, which needs instead to be said and said. Permit me the present tense.

Margaret Atwood

Postcards
I'm thinking about you. What else can I say? The palm trees on the reverse are a delusion; so is the pink sand. What we have are the usual fractured coke bottles and the smell of backed-up drains, too sweet, like a mango on the verge of rot, which we have also. The air clear sweat, mosquitoes & their tracks; birds & elusive. Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, it's called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward. The roosters crow for hours before dawn, and a prodded child howls & howls on the pocked road to school. In the hold with the baggage there are two prisoners, their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates of queasy chicks. Each spring there's race of cripples, from the store to the church. This is the sort of junk I carry with me; and a clipping about democracy from the local paper. Outside the window they're building the damn hotel, nail by nail, someone's crumbling dream. A universe that includes you can't be all bad, but does it? At this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's the place for the address. Wish you were here. Love comes in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on & on, a hollow cave in the head, filling & pounding, a kicked ear.

Margaret Atwood

Bored
All those times I was bored out of my mind. Holding the log while he sawed it. Holding the string while he measured, boards, distances between things, or pounded stakes into the ground for rows and rows of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored) weeded. Or sat in the back of the car, or sat still in boats, sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel he drove, steered, paddled. It wasn't even boredom, it was looking, looking hard and up close at the small details. Myopia. The worn gunwales, the intricate twill of the seat cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans of dry moss, the blackish and then the graying bristles on the back of his neck. Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes I would. The boring rhythm of doing things over and over, carrying the wood, drying the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what the animals spend most of their time at, ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels, shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed such things out, and I would look at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier all the time then, although it more often rained, and more birdsong? I could hardly wait to get the hell out of there to anywhere else. Perhaps though boredom is happier. It is for dogs or groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored. Now I would know too much. Now I would know.

Margaret Atwood

Provisions
What should we have taken with us? We never could decide on that; or what to wear, or at what time of year we should make the journey So here we are in thin raincoats and rubber boots On the disastrous ice, the wind rising Nothing in our pockets But a pencil stub, two oranges Four Toronto streetcar tickets and an elastic band holding a bundle of small white filing cards printed with important facts.

Margaret Atwood

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around alone in your house. It's two-thirty. Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit. You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple. Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it's baby lima beans. It's necessary to reserve a secret vice. This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud. You'd be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later. There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn't now. Outside there are sirens. Someone's been run over. The century grinds on.

Margaret Atwood

Sekhmet, the Lion-headed Goddess of War

He was the sort of man who wouldn't hurt a fly. Many flies are now alive while he is not. He was not my patron. He preferred full granaries, I battle. My roar meant slaughter. Yet here we are together in the same museum. That's not what I see, though, the fitful crowds of staring children learning the lesson of multicultural obliteration, sic transit and so on. I see the temple where I was born or built, where I held power. I see the desert beyond, where the hot conical tombs, that look from a distance, frankly, like dunces' hats, hide my jokes: the dried-out flesh and bones, the wooden boats in which the dead sail endlessly in no direction. What did you expect from gods with animal heads? Though come to think of it the ones made later, who were fully human were not such good news either. Favour me and give me riches, destroy my enemies. That seems to be the gist. Oh yes: And save me from death. In return we're given blood and bread, flowers and prayer, and lip service. Maybe there's something in all of this I missed. But if it's selfless love you're looking for, you've got the wrong goddess. I just sit where I'm put, composed of stone and wishful thinking: that the deity who kills for pleasure will also heal, that in the midst of your nightmare, the final one, a kind lion will come with bandages in her mouth and the soft body of a woman,

and lick you clean of fever, and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck and caress you into darkness and paradise.

Margaret Atwood

Siren Song
This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see beached skulls the song nobody knows because anyone who had heard it is dead, and the others cant remember. Shall I tell you the secret and if I do, will you get me out of this bird suit? I dont enjoy it here squatting on this island looking picturesque and mythical with these two feathery maniacs, I dont enjoy singing this trio, fatal and valuable. I will tell the secret to you, to you, only to you. Come closer. This song is a cry for help: Help me! Only you, only you can, you are unique at last. Alas it is a boring song but it works every time.

Margaret Atwood

Spelling
My daughter plays on the floor with plastic letters, red, blue & hard yellow, learning how to spell, spelling, how to make spells. I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, closed themselves in rooms, drew the curtains so they could mainline words. A child is not a poem, a poem is not a child. there is no either/or. However. I return to the story of the woman caught in the war & in labour, her thighs tied together by the enemy so she could not give birth. Ancestress: the burning witch, her mouth covered by leather to strangle words. A word after a word after a word is power. At the point where language falls away from the hot bones, at the point where the rock breaks open and darkness flows out of it like blood, at the melting point of granite when the bones know they are hollow & the word splits & doubles & speaks the truth & the body itself becomes a mouth. This is a metaphor. How do you learn to spell? Blood, sky & the sun, your own name first, your first naming, your first name, your first word.

Margaret Atwood

The City Planners

Cruising these residential Sunday streets in dry August sunlight: what offends us is the sanities: the houses in pedantic rows, the planted sanitary trees, assert levelness of surface like a rebuke to the dent in our car door. No shouting here, or shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt than the rational whine of a power mower cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass. But though the driveways neatly sidestep hysteria by being even, the roofs all display the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky, certain things: the smell of spilled oil a faint sickness lingering in the garages, a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise, a plastic hose poised in a vicious coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows give momentary access to the landscape behind or under the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners with the insane faces of political conspirators are scattered over unsurveyed territories, concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch transitory lines rigid as wooden borders on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb order in a bland madness of snows

Margaret Atwood

The Landlady
This is the lair of the landlady She is a raw voice loose in the rooms beneath me. the continuous henyard squabble going on below thought in this house like the bicker of blood through the head. She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells that bulge in under my doorsill; she presides over my meagre eating, generates the light for eyestrain. From her I rent my time: she slams my days like doors. Nothing is mine. and when I dream images of daring escapes through the snow I find myself walking always over a vast face which is the landlady's, and wake up shouting. She is a bulk, a knot swollen in a space. Though I have tried to find some way around her, my senses are cluttered by perception and can't see through her. She stands there, a raucous fact blocking my way: immutable, a slab of what is real. solid as bacon.

Margaret Atwood

The Moment
The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this, is the same moment when the trees unloose their soft arms from around you, the birds take back their language, the cliffs fissure and collapse, the air moves back from you like a wave and you can't breathe. No, they whisper. You own nothing. You were a visitor, time after time climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming. We never belonged to you. You never found us. It was always the other way round.

Margaret Atwood

The Rest
The rest of us watch from beyond the fence as the woman moves with her jagged stride into her pain as if into a slow race. We see her body in motion but hear no sounds, or we hear sounds but no language; or we know it is not a language we know yet. We can see her clearly but for her it is running in black smoke. The cluster of cells in her swelling like porridge boiling, and bursting, like grapes, we think. Or we think of explosions in mud; but we know nothing. All around us the trees and the grasses light up with forgiveness, so green and at this time of the year healthy. We would like to call something out to her. Some form of cheering. There is pain but no arrival at anything.

Margaret Atwood

The Shadow Voice

My shadow said to me: what is the matter

Isn't the moon warm enough for you why do you need the blanket of another body

Whose kiss is moss

Around the picnic tables The bright pink hands held sandwiches crumbled by distance. Flies crawl over the sweet instant

You know what is in these blankets

The trees outside are bending with children shooting guns. Leave them alone. They are playing games of their own.

I give water, I give clean crusts

Aren't there enough words flowing in your veins to keep you going.

Margaret Atwood

This is a Photograph of Me
It was taken some time ago At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper; then, as you scan it, you can see something in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house. In the background there is a lake, and beyond that, some low hills. (The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface. It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or how small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion. but if you look long enough eventually you will see me.)

Margaret Atwood

Variation On The Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun & three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center I would like to follow you up the long stairway again & become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and as you enter it as easily as breathing in I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed & that necessary.

Margaret Atwood

Variations on the Word Love

This is a word we use to plug holes with. It's the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heartshaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it. We insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. There are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love, you can rub it all over your body and you can cook with it too. How do we know it isn't what goes on at the cool debaucheries of slugs under damp pieces of cardboard? As for the weedseedlings nosing their tough snouts up among the lettuces, they shout it. Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising their glittering knives in salute. Then there's the two of us. This word is far too short for us, it has only four letters, too sparse to fill those deep bare vacuums between the stars that press on us with their deafness. It's not love we don't wish to fall into, but that fear. this word is not enough but it will have to do. It's a single vowel in this metallic silence, a mouth that says O again and again in wonder and pain, a breath, a finger grip on a cliffside. You can hold on or let go.

Margaret Atwood

You Fit Into Me

You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

Margaret Atwood