The Circle Game
Margaret Atwood


i

The children on the lawn
joined hand to hand
go round and round

each arm going into
the next arm, around
full circle
until it comes
back into each of the single
bodies again

They are singing, but
not to each other:
their feet move
almost in time to the singing

We can see
the concentration on
their faces, their eyes
fixed on the empty
moving spaces just in
front of them.

We might mistake this
tranced moving for joy

but there is no joy in it

We can see (arm in arm)
as we watch them go
round and round
intent, almost
studious (the grass
underfoot ignored, the trees

circling the lawn
ignored, the lake ignored)
the whole point
for them
of going round and round
is (faster
      slower)
going round and round

vii

Summer again;
in the mirrors of this room
the children wheel, singing
the same song;

This casual bed
scruffy as dry turf, 
the counterpane

rumpled with small burrows, is
their grassy lawn
and these scuffed walls

contain their circling trees,

that low clogged sink their lake

(a wasp comes, 

drawn by the piece of sandwich
left on the nearby beach
      (how carefully you do
      such details);
one of the children flinches
but won't let go)

You make them
turn and turn, according to
the closed rules of your games,
but there is no joy in it
and as we lie
arm in arm, neither
joined nor separate
      (your observations change me
      to a spineless woman in

      a cage of bones, obsolete fort

      pulled inside out),
our lips moving
almost in time to their singing,


listening to the opening
and closing of the drawers
in the next room

(of course there is always
danger but where
would you locate it)

(the children spin
a round cage of glass
from the warm air
with their thread-thin
insect voices)


and as we lie
here, caught
in the monotony of wandering

from room to room, shifting

the place of our defences

I want to break
these bones, your prisoning rhythms
      (winter,
      summer)
all the glass cases,

erase all maps,
crack the protecting
eggshell of your turning
singing children:

I want the circle
broken.