Power Politics

Poems

Margaret Atwood

• Verlag: House of Anansi Press
• Jahr: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780887849121
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Canadian Poetry

A groundbreaking meditation on sexual politics, love, and human tenacity from the world-renowned pioneer of feminist writing and prophetic author of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood.

When it first appeared in 1971, Margaret Atwood's Power Politics startled readers with its vital dance of woman and man. It still startles today, and is just as iconoclastic as ever. These poems occupy all at once the intimate, the political, and the mythic. Here Atwood makes us realize that we may think our own personal dichotomies are unique, but really they are multiple, universal. Clear, direct, wry, and unrelenting — Atwood's poetic powers are honed to perfection in this seminal work from her early career.

They are hostile nations

1

In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
the sea clogging, the air
nearing extinction

we should be kind, we should
take warning, we should forgive each other

Instead we are opposite, we
touch as though attacking,

the gifts we bring
even in good faith maybe
warp in our hands to
implements, to manoeuvres

2

Put down the target of me
you guard inside your binoculars,
in turn I will surrender

this aerial photograph
(your vulnerable
sections marked in red)
I have found so useful

See, we are alone in
the dormant field, the snow
that cannot be eaten or captured

3

Here there are no armies
here there is no money

It is cold and getting colder

We need each others’
breathing, warmth, surviving
is the only war
we can afford, stay

walking with me, there is almost
time / if we can only
make it as far as

the (possibly) last summer

Returning from the dead
used to be something I did well

I began asking why
I began forgetting how

Spring again, can I stand it
shooting its needles into
the earth, my head, both
used to darkness

Snow on brown soil and
the squashed caterpillar
coloured liquid lawn

Winter collapses
in slack folds around
my feet / no leaves yet / loose fat

Thick lilac buds crouch for the
spurt but I
hold back

Not ready / help me
what I want from you is
moonlight smooth as
wind, long hairs of water

This year I intended children
a space where I could raise
foxes and strawberries, finally
be reconciled to fur seeds & burrows

but the entrails of dead cards
are against me, foretell
it will be water, the

element that shaped
me, that I shape by
being in

It is the blue
cup, I fill it

it is the pond again
where the children, looking from
the side of the boat, see their mother

upside down, lifesize, hair streaming
over the slashed throat
and words fertilize each other
in the cold and with bulging eyes

I am sitting on the
edge of the impartial
bed, I have been turned to crystal, you enter

bringing love in the form of
a cardboard box (empty)
a pocket (empty)
some hands (also empty)

Be careful I say but
how can you

the empty
thing comes out of your hands, it
fills the room slowly, it is
a pressure, a lack of
pressure

Like a deep sea
creature with glass bones and wafer
eyes drawn
to the surface, I break

open, the pieces of me
shine briefly in your empty hands

I see you fugitive, stumbling across the prairie,
lungs knotted by thirst, sunheat
nailing you down, all the things
after you that can be after you
with their clamps and poisoned mazes

Should I help you?
Should I make you a mirage?

My right hand unfolds rivers
around you, my left hand releases its trees,
I speak rain,
I spin you a night and you hide in it.

Now you have one enemy
instead of many.

We are standing facing each other
in an eighteenth century room
with fragile tables and mirrors
in carved frames; the curtains,
red brocade, are drawn

the doors are shut, you aren’t talking,
the chandeliers aren’t talking, the carpets

also remain silent.
You stay closed, your skin
is buttoned firmly around you,
your mouth is a tin decoration,
you are in the worst possible taste.

You are fake as the marble trim
around the fireplace, there is nothing
I wouldn’t do t...