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Margaret Atwood 1939 -

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.
Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) was born in Ottawa, Canada. Her father was an
entomologist, and Atwood spent a large portion of her early years in the
wilderness of Northern Quebec. These childhood experiences fostered the
metaphysical preoccupation with nature found in much of her work. At the
age of seven Atwood's family moved to Toronto. She received her B.A. from
the University of Toronto and M.A. from Radcliffe College. In 1961 she
published her first collection of poetry, Double Persephone, which won the E.
J. Pratt Medal. She began work on a Ph.D. at Harvard University, but left
before she completed the degree to teach English at the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver. Atwood held various teaching positions in Canada
while working on her second poetry collection The Circle Game, published in
1964 and won the YWCA Women of Distinction Award and Governor
General's Award in 1966. While working as an editor at the Toronto
publishing house Anansi, Atwood published her controversial study of
Canadian Literature Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(1972). The book outlined Atwood's attempt to define a purely Canadian
literature, and, though some people did not agree with her conclusion that the
key theme in Canadian literature is victimization, it signified the beginning of
Atwood's desire to create a stronger national identity. Also at this time she
published her first novel, The Edible Woman (1970), which established her as
an important feminist critic as well. She continued to publish well-received
novels and poetry throughout the 1970s, including her first book of short
stories Dancing Girls and Other Stories in 1977. In 1986 she published The
Handmaid's Tale, a book that won numerous awards including The Los
Angeles Times Book Award (1986), the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best
Science Fiction, and the Commonwealth Literature Prize (both 1987) and
was adapted for the screen in 1990. She has published over 50 acclaimed
books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, and her most recent the novel, The
Blind Assassin, was published in 2000.

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