Dearly: New Poems

by Margaret Atwood

Don’t look behind, they say: You’ll turn to salt. Why not, though? Why not look? Isn’t it glittery? Isn’t it pretty, back there?

If there were no emptiness, there would be no life. Think about it. All those electrons, particles, and whatnot crammed in next to each other like junk in an attic, like trash in a compactor smashed together in a flat block so there’s nothing but plasma: no you no me. Therefore I praise vacancy.

Oh beware, uncover your hair or else they will burn down your castle. Wait a minute: Cover it! Hair. So controversial.

This is it, time is short, death is near, but first, first, first, first in the hot sun, searing, all day long, in a month that has no name: this annoying noise of love. This maddening racket. This—admit it—song.

Oh yes, In Love, that demented rose-red circus tent whose half-light forgives all visuals, fig-leaves our lovers, and softens our own brains and the pain of our sawdust pratfalls.

Someone wants your body. What’s the deal? Beg, borrow, buy, or steal? Gutter or pedestal? That’s how it is with bodies that someone wants. What’s it worth to you? A rose, a diamond, a cool million, a joke, a drink? The fiction that this one likes you?

If birds are human souls What bird are you? A spring bird with a joyful song? A high flyer? Are you an evening bird Watching the moon Singing Alone, Alone, Singing Dead Too Soon? Are you an owl, Soft-feathered predator? Are you hunting, restlessly hunting The soul of your murderer?

So many sisters lost So many lost sisters Over the years, thousands of years So many sent away Too soon into the night By men who thought they had the right Rage and hatred Jealousy and fear So many sisters killed Over the years, thousands of years Killed by fearful men Who wanted to be taller Over the years, thousands of years So many sisters lost So many tears . . .

They’re digging up the Scythians— the warrior women, the dagger girls, the hard riders, tattooed up to the armpits with sinuous animals, and buried with their weapons— who were not mythical, who existed after all (a bracelet, a trinket, a delicate skull), laid to rest with honour, them and their axe-felled horses.

a leathery globe of dusty spores, a nibbled pebbly moon, a dried half-sphere, a blackened ear.

The word reft: who says that any more? Yet it was honed, like all words, in the mouths of hundreds, of thousands, rolled like a soundstone over and over, sharpened by the now dead until it reached this form: reft reft

The body, once your accomplice, is now your trap.

It’s an old word, fading now. Dearly did I wish. Dearly did I long for. I loved him dearly.

So hard to describe the smallest details of flowers. This is a stamen, nothing to do with men. This is a pistil, nothing to do with guns. It’s the smallest details that foil translators and myself too, trying to describe.

Some berries occur in sun, but they are smaller. It’s as I always told you: the best ones grow in shadow.