Two-Headed Poems Quotes

“How can I teach her
some way of being human
that won't destroy her

I would like to tell her, Love
is enough, I would like to say,
Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance
and be happy. Instead I will say
in my crone’s voice, Be
ruthless when you have to, tell
the truth when you can,
when you can see it.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“How can I teach her
some way of being human
that won’t destroy her?”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“Our fragments made us.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“These words are yours,
though you never said them,
you never heard them, history
breeds death but if you kill
it you kill yourself.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“She is the witch you burned
by daylight and crept from your home

to consult & bribe at night. The love
that tortured you you blamed on her.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“For so much time, our history
was written in bones only.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“It was love, after all,
that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks,
crippled their fingers,
snarled their hair, brown or dull gold.
Hate would merely have smashed them.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart


I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“A river shaped her,
smoothed her with sand and battered
her against the shore, and she
resisted, she is still here.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“This is the rock garden.
In it, the stones
too are flowers”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“Did we make them
because we needed to love someone
and could not love each other?”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“You want the air
but not the words that come with it:
breathe at your peril.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“You can’t live here without breathing
someone else’s air,
air that has been used to shape
these hidden words that are not yours.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems

“Later she will learn
about edges. Or better, find
by luck or a longer journey
the shadow of that liquid
gold place, which can be
so single and clear for her
only now, when it means danger
only to me.”
― Margaret Atwood, Two-Headed Poems