Poetry Friday

I have decided that I need to think seriously about one poet at a time.  This new goal of mine will probably last about 1 week. But I thought it fitting that I choose some Canadian poets and get to know them.  A google search helped me discover that Margaret Atwood has some poetry.  I have loved many of her books.  “A Handmaid’s Tale” was the first I had ever read.  I was in my first year of college and who knows how I came to be reading that book, but it has stuck with me all these years.  (OK…not that many years!)  I have enjoyed many of her books, but have only come to know her since moving to Canada and as soon as I saw her on The Rick Mercer Report wearing a hockey sweater, I knew I really liked her and not just her writing.  I like this poem because I have been this girl, sneaking food in the middle of the night, enjoying my time alone and at the same time feeling sorry for myself for being alone.

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It’s two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it’s baby lima beans.
It’s necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You’d be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn’t now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone’s been run over.
The century grinds on.

– By Margaret Atwood, Copyright © O.W. Toad Ltd. 1995.
Originally published in Morning in the Burned House
(McClelland & Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, Virago, 1995)

 

I have to say this website is a bit confusing, but it is the official reference site for Margaret Atwood.  You have to enter the site, the click on the desk icon, then mouse over the drawers until you find that one that contains the recent poem.  It’s worth the hunt. :)