Power Politics Quotes

“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“You aren't sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“i)
We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aims, our choices
turn them criminal.

ii)
Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them

iii)
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

iv)
Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“Because you are never here
but always there, I forget
not you but what you look like

You drift down the street
in the rain, your face
dissolving, changing shape, the colours
running together

My walls absorb
you, breathe you forth
again, you resume
yourself, I do not recognize you

You rest on the bed
watching me watching
you, we will never know
each other any better
than we do now”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“there is something in your throat that wants
to get out and you won't let it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“You are the sun
in reverse, all energy
flows into you and is abolished”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“You want to go back
to where the sky was inside us”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“I say, leave me
alone, this is my winter,

I will stay here if I choose”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“(it is no longer possible
to be both human and alive)”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“and there isn't anything
I want to do about the fact
that you are unhappy & sick

you aren't sick & unhappy
only alive & stuck with it”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“too many
postponements & regrets”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“not the shore but an aquarium
filled with exhausted water and warm
seaweed”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“Beyond truth,
tenacity: of those
dwarf trees & mosses,
hooked into straight rock
believing the sun's lies & thus
refuting / gravity”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“You say, Do you / love me, do you love me / I answer you: / I stretch your arms out / one to either side, / your head slumps forward.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“Around my neck I wear
the head of the beloved, pressed
in the metal retina like a picked flower.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“you occupy
me so completely

run through my brain as warm
chemicals and melted
gold, spread out wings to the
ends of my fingers
reach my heart and
stop, digging your claws in”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“Returning from the dead
used to be something I did well

I began asking why
I began forgetting how”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“How long will you demand I love you?”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“How long do you expect me to wait
while you cauterize your
senses, one
after another
turning yourself to an
impervious glass tower?”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“You attempt merely power
you accomplish merely suffering”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“your kiss no longer literature
but fine print, a set of instructions.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“grey as a used angel”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“it was at least three weeks before
I got the telegram and could start regretting.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“I watched
your snapshot fade for twenty years.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“At first I was given centuries
to wait in caves, in leather
tents, knowing you would never come back”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“you appear
without prelude midway between
my eyes and the nearest trees,
your colours bright, your
outline flattened

suspended in the air with no more
reason for occurring
exactly here than this billboard,
this highway or that cloud.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“Why should I need
to explain you”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“I locate you on streets, in cities
I've never seen, you walk
against a background crowded
with lifelike detail

which crumbles and turns grey
when I look too closely.”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“Because we have no history
I construct one for you

making use of what
there is, parts of other people's
lives, paragraphs
I invent, now and then
an object, a watch, a picture
you claim as yours”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“Can't play it safe, can't play
at all any more”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems