We've had two snows in the last week; not nearly as much as they had north of us, but still...
Artist: Olga Kavsha
I've been delighting in the artwork on Snow wolf's Winter Nook, a page on Facebook. So I will be sharing some of that artwork during these February days.
Here's a poem by Margaret Atwood:
February
Winter.
Time to eat fat
and watch
hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black
fur sausage with yellow
Houdini
eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get
onto my head. It’s his
way of
telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m
not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll
think of something. He settles
on my
chest, breathing his breath
of
burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring
like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a
capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring
war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are
what will finish us off
in the
long run. Some cat owners around here
should
snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids
were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat
our young, like sharks.
But it’s
love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches
in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown,
and the windchill factor hits
thirty
below, and pollution pours
out of
our chimneys to keep us warm.
February,
month of despair,
with a
skewered heart in the centre.
I think
dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a
splash of vinegar.
Cat,
enough of your greedy whining
and your
small pink bumhole.
Off my
face! You’re the life principle,
more or
less, so get going
on a
little optimism around here.
Get rid
of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning
in the Burned House. Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Used by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
Source: Morning in the Burned House (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 1995)
No comments:
Post a Comment