By Margaret Atwood

This is what you changed me to:

a greypink vegetable with slug

eyes, buttock

incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip,

a skin you stuff so you may feed

in your turn, a stinking wart

of flesh, a large tuber

of blood which munches

and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile

I have the sky, which is only half

caged, I have my weed corners,

I keep myself busy, singing

my song of roots and noses,

my song of dung. Madame,

this song offends you, these grunts

which you find oppressively sexual,

mistaking simple greed for lust.

I am yours. If you feed me garbage,

I will sing a song of garbage.

This is a hymn.

By Hadara Bar-Nadav

Blistered apple,
gold that molts

the eye & boils
animals in their caves.

I touch & touch

          & touch,

branding the hands
of each child.

A circle
of unmoored fury.

I see death all
around you—

          your phantomed self
          charred blue,

          cast against
          asphalt.

The body’s ash already
visible,

          unglittering
          in its cheap velvet.

Bow down
in the brilliance

          of your borrowed light.

Let me ignite
your end.

by Louise Gluck

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little.  And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.

A frog jumps in

The splash of water.

-- Matsuo Basho