Margaret Atwood

Best known for her fiction (The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake), Canadian Margaret Atwood has been writing poetry for 4 decades. She has not published new poetry since 1992... her poetry is frank and disarming. Here's one of my favorites:

MORE AND MORE

More and more frequently the edges

of me dissolve and I become

a wish to assimilate the world, including

you, if possible through the skin

like a cool plant's tricks with oxygen

and live by a harmless green burning.

I would not consume

you or ever

finish, you would still be there

surrounding me, complete

as the air.

Unfortunately I don't have leaves.

Instead I have eyes

and teeth and other non-green

things which rule out osmosis.

So be careful, I mean it,

I give you fair warning:

This kind of hunger draws

everything into its own

space; nor can we

talk it all over, have a calm

rational discussion.

There is no reason for this, only

a starved dog's logic about bones.

~Margaret Atwood