TUESDAY POEM | The Blue Snake by Margaret Atwood

                       

                       THE BLUE SNAKE 

                       The snake winds through your head
                       into the temple which stands on a hill
                       and is not much visited now.

                       Toppled stones clutter the paving
                       where the blue snake swims towards you,
                       dry in the dry air,
                       blue as a vein or a fading bruise.
                       It looks at you from the side of its head
                       as snakes do. It flickers.

                       What does it know
                       that it needs to tell you?
                       What do you need to be told?
                     
                       You are surprised to hear it speak.
                       It has the voice of a flute
                       when you first blow into it,
                       long and breathless; it has an old voice,
                       like the blue stars, liked the unborn,
                       the voice of things beginning and ceasing.

                       As you listen, you grow heavier.
                       It asks you why you are here,
                       and you can't answer.

                       It begins to glow,
                       it's almost transparent now,
                       you can see the spine
                       with its many pairs of delicate ribs
                       unrolling like a feather.

                       This has gone far enough,
                       you think, and turn away.
                       It isn't what you came for.

                       Behind you the snake dissolves
                       and flows into the rock.

                       On the plain below you is a river
                       you know you must follow home.

                       Margaret Atwood
                           from her collection Interlunar, first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd in 1988

Photograph by Michael Melford, National Geographic with aerial support by Lighthawk

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is UK-based writer, Belinda Hollyer

with Saturday, Ocean Creek 

a spatially vast and haunting poem by Fred D'Aguiar 

                                "Sometimes the morning shakes itself from its moorings

                                To this world and lifts skywards with a fighter jet's roar,

                                Everyone lucky enough to be up and about looks to the east. . . "

(Belinda has - lucky us - posted a second Fred D'Aguiar poem on her blog.  The Rose of Toulouse and Saturday, Ocean Creek exhort me to look at familiar things differently.

For more Tuesday Poetry - a whole lot more - please click on the quill.

TUESDAY POEM - Disturbed Earth by Margaret Atwood

Detail from a work in progress - Oil on Paper - 2012

                           DISTURBED EARTH

                           Disturbed earth: some plants sprout quickly in it.
                           Sow thistles come to mind.
                           After you've wrenched them out
                           they'll snake back underground
                           and thrust their fleshy prickled snouts in
                           where you'd intended hostas.

                           Hawkweed will do that. Purslane. Purple vetch.
                           Marginals, hugging ditches,
                           flagrant with seed,
                           strewing their paupers' bouquets.

                           Why is it you reject them,
                           them and their tangled harmonies
                           and raffish madrigals?
                           Because they thwart your will.

                           I feel the same about them:
                           I hack and dig,
                           I stomp their pods and stems,
                           I slash and crush them. Still,

                           suppose I make a comeback -
                           a transmutation, say -
                           once I've been spaded under?
                           Some quirky growth or ambush?

                           Don't search the perennial border:
                           look for me in disturbed earth.

                           Margaret Atwood
                           from The Door

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Seattle-based poet Therese Clear 

with March 6, 1890: Eugene Schieffelin Releases 80 Starlings in Central Park 

by Holly J. Hughes

Please click on the quill. 

Tuesday Poem - Elegy for the giant tortoises

ELEGY FOR THE GIANT TORTOISES

Let others pray for the passenger pigeon

the dodo, the whooping crane, the eskimo:

everyone must specialize

I will confine myself to a meditation

upon the giant tortoises

withering finally on a remote island.

I concentrate in subway stations,

in parks, I can't quite see them,

they move to the peripheries of my eyes

but on the last day they will be there;

already the event

like a wave traveling shapes vision:

on the road where I stand they will materialize,

plodding past me in a straggling line

awkward without water

their small heads pondering

from side to side, their useless armour

sadder than tanks and history,

in their closed gaze ocean and sunlight paralyzed,

lumbering up the steps, under the archways

toward the square glass altars

where the brittle gods are kept,

the relics of what we have destroyed,

our holy and obsolete symbols.

Margaret Atwood

from Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965 - 1995

I'm busy preparing paper for a series of new paintings that will be part of an ArtScience exhibition here in Dunedin early next month. The title of the show is BLEND. There's no way I can't not make work in response to the environmental calamity in the Gulf. I can't get the manatees, seabirds, foraminifera, turtles. . . out of my head. The words 'oil and water do not mix, oil and water do not mix' have been pounding in my chest like a storm; a chant, a plea, a protest. . .

Margaret Atwood's website is (as you'd imagine) a roomy place that, amongst its many treasures, offers generous resources for writers (ref. Negotiating with the Dead: A writer on writing). She has also included 'links of interest', photographs, media clips, podcasts of interviews, reviews, readings. . .

Remarkably, she wrote ELEGY FOR THE GIANT TORTOISES in 1968.

Click here for more Tuesday poems.