One of my very favorites---
Spelling
Margaret Atwood
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue and hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells
_________
and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
____
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.
__________
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labor, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
________
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
____________
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky, & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
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