Tag: poems

Found a wonderful collection of poems by Margaret Atwood called, The Door. Here are two of the most beautiful. Click the link below them to order the full collection.

Heart
Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.
The hard part is getting the damn thing out.

A kind of twisting motion, like sucking an oyster,
your spine a wrist,
and then, hup! it’s in your mouth.
You turn yourself partially inside out
like a sea anemone coughing a pebble.
There’s a broken plop, the racket
of fish guts into a pail,
and there it is, a huge glistening deep-red clot
of the still-alive past, whole on the plate.

It gets passed around. It’s slippery. It gets dropped,
but also tasted. Too coarse, says one. Too salty.
Too sour, says another, making a face.
Each one is an instant gourmet,
and you stand listening to all this
in the corner, like a newly hired waiter,
your diffident, skilful hand on the wound hidden
deep in your shirt and chest,
shyly, heartless.

–

Your Children Cut Their Hands
Your children cut their hands on glass
by reaching through the mirror
where the beloved one was hiding.

You weren’t expecting this:
you thought they wanted happiness,
not laceration.

You though the happiness
would appear simply, without effort
or any kind of work,

like a bird call
or a pathside flower
or a school of silvery fish

but now they’ve cut themselves
on love, and cry in secret,
and your own hands go numb

because there’s nothing you can do,
because you didn’t tell them not to
because you didn’t think
you needed to
and there’s all this broken glass
and your children stand red-handed

still clutching at moons and echoes
and emptiness and shadow,
the way you did

Click here to buy the full collection

If I write now:

‘I want to live
and I want to love
and still see you and the sun’
then later they’ll just
shrug and say:
‘The poor thing had no idea’

Better to speak of my premonition of our dying
Then at least someone will nod and say:
‘How prophetic!
He knew about it all the time’

But then premonitions of death
always come true in the end
just as the great rain prayers
of some native tribe
are never unanswered
because they dance the rain dance
day in and day out
till it really begins to rain again

So I declare in writing
being of sound mind:
‘You won’t have to wait so very long
for my longing is already beginning
to lose faith in itself
and I am often tired
in the middle of the day

And if I open my heart
perhaps my love will fall out
like a brittle
pressed four-leaf clover
Not long now
till I come visit you
as a pebble or a fly
no one recognises’