Selected Poems 1 Quotes

“Eating Fire

Eating fire

is your ambition:
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent
tongue, a word
exploding from you in gold, crimson,
unrolling in a brilliant scroll

To be lit up from within
vein by vein

To be the sun”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“though the real question is
whether or not I will make you immortal.”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“Late August"

Late August —
This is the plum season, the nights
blue and distended, the moon
hazed, this is the season of peaches

with their lush lobed bulbs
that glow in the dusk, apples
that drop and rot
sweetly, their brown skins veined as glands

No more the shrill voices
that cried Need Need
from the cold pond, bladed
and urgent as new grass

Now it is the crickets
that say Ripe Ripe
slurred in the darkness, while the plums

dripping on the lawn outside
our window, burst
with a sound like thick syrup
muffled and slow

The air is still
warm, flesh moves over
flesh, there is no

hurry”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“In restaurants we argue over which of us will pay for your funeral / though the real question is whether or not I will make you immortal.”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“I saw you as another god.”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“This is what you changed me to:
a greypink vegetable with slug
eyes, buttock
incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip,

a skin you stuff so you may feed
in your turn, a stinking wart
of flesh, a large tuber
of blood which munches
and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile

I have the sky, which is only half
caged, I have my weed corners,
I keep myself busy, singing
my song of roots and noses,

my song of dung. Madame,
this song offends you, these grunts
which you find oppressively sexual,
mistaking simple greed for lust.

I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
I will sing a song of garbage.
This is a hymn.”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“will be less dignified, more painful, death will be sooner,
(it is no longer possible
to be both human and alive) : lying piled with
the others, your face and body
covered so thickly with scars
only the eyes show through.”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975

“Charivari ‘They capped their heads with feathers, masked
their faces, wore their clothes backwards, howled
with torches through the midnight winter and dragged the black man from his house
to the jolting music of broken
instruments, pretending to each other it was a joke, until
they killed him. I don’t know
what happened to the white bride.’ The American lady, adding she
thought it was a disgraceful piece
of business, finished her tea. (Note: Never pretend this isn’t
part of the soil too, teadrinkers, and inadvertent
victims and murderers, when we come this way again in other forms, take care
to look behind, within
where the skeleton face beneath the face puts on its feather mask, the arm
within the arm lifts up the spear:
Resist those cracked drumbeats. Stop this. Become human.)”
― Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems 1: 1965-1975