Variations On The Word Love
This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.
Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.
Notes
Where John Keats internalized the seasons as a climate of mortal decay, Margaret Atwood subjects our most worn-out sentiment to the cold machinery of post-modern semiotics, stripping "love" of its romantic aura to reveal how advertising slogans and greeting-card syntax have ground the word into background static. The speaking subject exposes how the syllable repeats endlessly across consumer culture, affixed to magazines, grocery aisles, and casual gestures, only to claw beneath the cultural cliché and uncover an ancient, unsparing hunger that demands everything while offering no comforting script. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the linguistic degradation and uncanny return of language, proving that when a word is emptied out by social repetition, it does not die; it doubles back as a feral, unnamable weight asking us to mean it all over again in the dark. #September #MargaretAtwood #Echo #love #Poetry