Dearly: New Poems

by Margaret Atwood

I’ve always liked books, by preference paperbacks, crumbling and flyspecked. To their texts I add my annotations, brash and untidy:

The world that we think we see is only our best guess.

The blackberries gleam like glass, like the glass ornaments we hang on trees in December to remind ourselves to be grateful for snow. Some berries occur in sun, but they are smaller. It’s as I always told you: the best ones grow in shadow.