Canada, (b. 1939)
Pig Song
- 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.
Circe / Mud Poems (excerpt)
- Men with the heads of eagles
- no longer interest me
- or pig-men, or those who can fly
- with the aid of wax and feathers
- or those who take off their clothes
- to reveal other clothes
- or those with skins of blue leather
- or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
- or those with claws, the stuffed ones
- with glass eyes; or those
- hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.
- All these I could create, manufacture,
- or find easily: they swoop and thunder
- around this island, common as flies,
- sparks flashing, bumping into each other,
- on hot days you can watch them
- as they melt, come apart,
- fall into the ocean
- like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.
- I search instead for the others,
- the ones left over,
- the ones who have escaped from these
- mythologies with barely their lives;
- they have real faces and hands, they think
- of themselves as
- wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.
- It was not my fault, these animals
- who once were lovers
- it was not my fault, the snouts
- and hooves, the tongues
- thickening and rough, the mouths grown over
- with teeth and fur
- I did not add the shaggy
- rugs, the tusked masks,
- they happened
- I did not say anything, I sat
- and watched, they happened
- because I did not say anything.
- It was not my fault, these animals
- who could no longer touch me
- through the rinds of their hardening skins,
- these animals dying
- of thirst because they could not speak
- these drying skeletons
- that have crashed and litter the ground
- under the cliffs, these
- wrecked words.
About the Poet
Margaret Atwood, (b. 1939) is regarded as one of Canada’s finest living writers. She is a poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic and environmental activist. Her more recent novels have also explored areas of historical and speculative fiction.
Suffering is common for the female characters in Atwood’s poems, although they are never passive victims – “modern woman’s anguish at finding herself isolated and exploited (although also exploiting) by the imposition of a sex role power structure.”
Atwood’s interest in women and female experience also emerges clearly in her novels, “depicting the painful psychic warfare between men and women”. [Condensed from her biography at The Poetry Foundation.] [DES-11/10]