Margaret Atwood is probably best known for her novel, A Handmaid’s Tale, often referred to as a work of “speculative fiction.” However, what many people may not know about her is she’s also an accomplished poet, having published 15 collections of poetry. Margaret Atwood is a poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist, and the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. She’s internationally acclaimed and awarded, with her work being translated into French, German, Italian, Urdu, Estonian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Catalan, Turkish, Russian, Finnish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, Japanese, Icelandic, Spanish, Hebrew, and several other languages. All of the fiction is available in paperback in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K.

The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart
Margaret Atwood

I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though to twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping
but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.

~From Selected Poems II (1976-1986) by Margaret Atwood, 1987.

Video: Margaret Atwood reads “Night Poem”