Spelling (Margaret Atwood)

Dijo Gustavo que poesía eres tú. Traducido para mí (que soy más poesía que otra cosa): poesía sos vos. Dice la RAE que poesía es una composición literaria que se concibe como expresión artística de la belleza por medio de la palabra, en especial aquella que está sujeta a la medida y cadencia del verso. Dijo Isidoro Blaistein que la poesía es muy fácil porque se escribe toda chiquita y p'abajo. Tantos poetas y poetisas enormes. Borges arriba, claro. La tenue Emily. El adelantado Marechal. El Gran Chileno. Octavio. Keats. Machado. El dantesco Dante. Das Bard. Bertolt. Y ella...

SPELLING

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue and hard yellow,

learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

*

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
and  in labour, 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 and  the word
splits and  doubles and  speaks
the truth and  the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

*

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky and the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

Margaret Atwood