this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.
Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.
--Margaret Atwood
While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she is also a poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date.[1][2] Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age.[3] Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Atwood
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4 comments:
I'm quite sure the poem is very profound..but it is also very confusing. Kinda like trying to describe to a blind man the color yellow.
Good analogy, logjam.
I'm much more in love with the sound and rhythms of poetry than the meaning.
"The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words."
I don't know that I can make "sense" of that. I looked at a number of her poems and a few of them seemed to suddenly jump the tracks. To what effect, I'm not sure.
I picked this poem for its sound and meter, and the way it starts and ends at the same place, kind of like life, kind of like the round world. It brought back memories of early childhood, of learning, of going from lesson to lesson, learning about life.
lovely.
I liked the meter as well. I also like the profoundness. I'm sure I don't "get" it all, but what I think I do, I like.
I had a class on poetry. I remember sitting amid maybe, 100 kids. The teacher would read a poem, then ask the meaning of a verse. Someone would raise their hand. I remember thinking, wtf, where did they get *that* from? lol.
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