The house we built gradually
from the ground up when we were young
(three
rooms, the walls
raw trees)
burned down
last year they said
I didn’t
see it, and so
the house is still there in me
among branches as always I
stand
inside it looking out
at the rain moving across the lake
but when
I go back
to the empty place in the forest
the house will blaze and
crumple
suddenly in my mind
collapsing like a cardboard carton
thrown
on a bonfire, summers
crackling, my earlierselves outlined in flame.
Left
in my head will be
the blackened earth: the truth.
Where did the house
go?
Where do the words go
when we have said them?
from Selected Poems 1965-1975, (Houghton Mifflin)
Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Canada (1939). Her father was a forest entomologist, and she grew up in a log cabin in a remote area of Northwestern Québec. Her novels include Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1993) and Alias Grace (1996).
"I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault. My hair darkened overnight, my nose lengthened, I gave up football for the cello, my clothes changed colour in the closet, all by themselves, from pink to black. I stopped humming the songs from Oklahoma and began quoting Kirkegaard..”
http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/atwood/atwood.htm
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