加载中…【Margaret Atwood：poems】
(2014-05-12 13:08:58)
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Confess: it’s my
profession
that alarms
you.
This is why few
people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows
I don’t go out of my way to be scary.
I wear dresses of
sensible cut
and unalarming
shades of beige,
I smell of
lavender and go to the hairdresser’s:
no prophetess
mane of mine,
complete with
snakes, will frighten the youngsters.
If I roll my eyes
and mutter,
if I clutch at my
heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate
actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in
private and nobody sees
but the bathroom
mirror.
In general I
might agree with you:
women should not
contemplate war,
should not weigh
tactics impartially,
or evade the
word
or view both
sides and denounce nothing.
Women should
march for peace,
or hand out white
feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves
on bayonets
to protect their
babies,
whose skulls will
be split anyway,
or, having been
raped repeatedly,
hang themselves
with their own hair.
These are the
functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the
knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of
moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning
the dead.
Sons, lovers, and
so forth.
All the killed
children.
Instead of this,
I tell
what I hope will
pass as truth.
A blunt thing,
not lovely.
The truth is
seldom welcome,
especially at
dinner,
though I am good
at what I do.
My trade is
courage and atrocities.
I look at them
and do not condemn.
I write things
down the way they happened,
as near as can be
remembered.
I don’t
ask
Wars happen
because the ones who start them
think they can
win.
In my dreams
there is glamour.
The Vikings leave
their fields
each year for a
few months of killing and plunder,
much as the boys
go hunting.
In real life they
were farmers.
They come back
loaded with splendour.
The Arabs ride
against Crusaders
with scimitars
that could sever
silk in the
air.
A swift cut to
the horse’s neck
and a hunk of
armour crashes down
like a tower.
Fire against metal.
A poet might say:
romance against banality.
When awake, I
know better.
Despite the
propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can
be finally buried.
Finish one off,
and circumstances
and the radio
create another.
Believe me: whole
armies have prayed fervently
to God all night
and meant it,
and been
slaughtered anyway.
Brutality wins
frequently,
and large
outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical
device, viz. radar.
True, valour
sometimes counts for something,
as at
Thermopylae. Sometimes being right—
though ultimate
virtue, by agreed tradition,
is decided by the
winner.
Sometimes men
throw themselves on grenades
and burst like
paper bags of guts
to save their
comrades.
I can admire
that.
But rats and
cholera have won many wars.
Those, and
potatoes,
or the absence of
them.
It’s no use
pinning all those medals
across the chests
of the dead.
Impressive, but I
know too much.
Grand exploits
merely depress me.
In the interests
of research
I have walked on
many battlefields
that once were
liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and
spangled with exploded
shells and
splayed bone.
All of them have
been green again
by the time I got
there.
Each has inspired
a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels
brood like hens
over the grassy
nests where nothing hatches.
(The angels could
just as well be described as
or
The
word
Of course I pick
a flower or two
from each, and
press it in the hotel Bible
for a
souvenir.
I’m just as human
as you.
But it’s no use
asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal
in tactics.
Also
statistics:
for every year of
peace there have been four hundred
years of
war.
February
Winter. Time to
eat fat
and watch hockey.
In the pewter mornings, the
cat,
a black fur
sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes,
jumps up on the bed and
tries
to get onto my
head. It’s his
way of telling
whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he
wants to be scratched; if I
am
He’ll think of
something. He settles
on my chest,
breathing his breath
of burped-up meat
and musty sofas,
purring like a
washboard. Some other
tomcat,
not yet a capon,
has been spraying our front
door,
declaring war.
It’s all about sex and
territory,
which are what
will finish us off
in the long run.
Some cat owners around
here
should snip a few
testicles. If we
wise
hominids were
sensible, we’d do that
too,
or eat our young,
like sharks.
But it’s love
that does us in. Over and
over
again,
crouches in the
bedsheets, ambushing the
pulsing
eiderdown, and
the windchill factor
hits
thirty below, and
pollution pours
out of our
chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month
of despair,
with a skewered
heart in the centre.
I think dire
thoughts, and lust for French
fries
with a splash of
vinegar.
Cat, enough of
your greedy whining
and your small
pink bumhole.
Off my face!
You’re the life principle,
more or less, so
get going
on a little
optimism around here.
Get rid of death.
Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Backdrop addresses cowboy
BYStarspangled
cowboy
sauntering out of
the almost-
silly West, on
your face
a porcelain
grin,
tugging a
papier-mâché cactus
on wheels behind
you with a string,
you are innocent
as a bathtub
full of
bullets.
Your righteous
eyes, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the
streets with villains:
as you move, the
air in front of you
blossoms with
targets
and you leave
behind you a heroic
trail of
desolation:
beer
bottles
slaughtered by
the side
of the road,
bird-
skulls bleaching
in the sunset.
I ought to be
watching
from behind a
cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting
starts, hands clasped
in
admiration,
but I am
elsewhere.
Then what about
me
what about the
I
confronting you
on that border,
you are always
trying to cross?
I am the
horizon
you ride towards,
the thing you can never lasso
I am also what
surrounds you:
my brain
scattered with
your
tincans, bones,
empty shells,
the litter of
your invasions.
I am the space
you desecrate
as you pass
through.
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.
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