Betty's now have a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it's in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they've had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights.
Margaret AtwoodWhen power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.
Margaret AtwoodCELL
Now look objectively. You have to
admit the cancer cell is beautiful.
If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty,
with its mauve centre and pink petals
of if a cover for a pulpy thirties
sci-fi magazine. How striking:
as an alien, a success,
all purple eye and jelly tentacles
and spines, or are they gills,
creeping around on granular Martian
dirt red as the inside of the body,
while its tender walls
expand and burst, its spores
scatter elsewhere, take root, like money,
drifting like a fiction or
miasma in and out of people's
brains, digging themselves
industriously in. The lab technician
says, It has forgotten
how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more
amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. to take
more. to eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on
doing those things forever. Such desires
are not unknown. Look in the mirror.
Tags: poetry cancer-cell
There is the staircase,
there is the sun.
There is the kitchen,
the plate with toast and strawberry jam,
your subterfuge,
your ordinary mirage.
You stand red-handed.
You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grass
What are you supposed to do
with all this loss?
In the daylight we know
what's gone is gone,
but at night it's different.
Nothing gets finished,
not dying, not mourning;
the dead repeat themselves, like clumsy drunks
lurching sideways through the doors
we open to them in sleep;
these slurred guests, never entirely welcome,
even those we have loved the most,
especially those we have loved the most,
returning from where we shoved them
away too quickly:
from under the ground, from under the water,
they clutch at us, they clutch at us,
we won't let go.
UP
You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
there is birdsong,
you can't get out of bed.
It's something about the crumpled sheets
hanging over the edge like jungle
foliage, the terry slippers gaping
their dark pink mouths for your feet,
the unseen breakfast--some of it
in the refrigerator you do not dare
to open--you will not dare to eat.
What prevents you? The future. The future tense,
immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density
and drowned events pressing you down,
like sea water, like gelatin
filling your lungs instead of air.
Forget all that and let's get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house is on fire
and you must run or burn.
No, that one's useless.
It's never worked before.
Where is it coming form, this echo,
this huge No that surrounds you,
silent as the folds of the yellow
curtains, mute as the cheerful
Mexican bowl with its cargo
of mummified flowers?
(You chose the colours of the sun,
not the dried neutrals of shadow.
God knows you've tried.)
Now here's a good one:
you're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?
Tags: fear life past future poetry forgiveness anxiety
Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as they hit below, We were standing underneath when you told it. People do that with themselves when they are finished, light scooped out. He landed here, you said, marking it with your foot.
You wouldn't do it that way, empty, you wouldn't wait, you would jump with the light still in you.
How much longer can I get away
with being so fucking cute?
Not much longer.
Tags: poetry
I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key words: love, alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose.
Margaret AtwoodI exist in two places,
here and where you are.
What we share may be a lot like a traffic accident but we get one another. We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something.
Margaret Atwood« first previous
Page 85 of 101.
next last »
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.