Asian Geographic Issue 06/2016 (122) | Page 3

timeless

You
Begin

By Margaret Atwood

IMAGE © SHUTTERSTOCK

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
this is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

Outside the window is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colours of these nine crayons.

This is your hand, these are my hands,
this is the world, which is round but not
flat and has more colours
than we can see.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

MARGARET ATWOOD is a Canadian poet
and novelist who is also known for her
literary criticism and environmental activism.
She won the Booker Prize for The Blind
Assassin and holds honorary degrees from
Oxford University and Cambridge University.