Flying Inside Your Own Body by Margaret Atwood
Flying Inside Your Own Body
Margaret AtwoodYour lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones,
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon
and your heart is too light & too huge,
beating with pure joy, with pure helium.
The sun’s white winds blow through you,
there’s nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It’s only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the think pink rind of your skull.
It’s always the moment before the gunshot.
You try & rise but you cannot.
MARGINALIA
I remember reading this back in college and feeling like Atwood has been in my head always.
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Selected Poems II (1976-1986) by Margaret Atwood, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
ABOUT MARGARET ATWOOD
Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario. She earned a BA from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and an MA from Harvard University. Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her works of poetry include Dearly (Ecco, 2020); The Door (Houghton Mifflin 2007); Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965–1995 (Virago Press Limited, 1998); and Morning in the Burned House (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), which was a co-winner of the… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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Neil
serindipitously tripped on your blog — love it … these things seem to live forever in wordpress … well done