I was reading a scientific article

Margaret Atwood

I apologise, right off the bat, for this hiatus between poems. I have been in no network areas- plus the green paddy fields and forests of Gondhia at the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh borders made it difficult to come back to the screen. The incessant rain, and the furry white flowers of the sagwan tree are a romantic sight for eyes that have grown tired, momentarily, of the excesses and the vile air of the city- I mean Delhi. The news from the national capital is grim - indiscriminate arrests of intellectuals, and the state manufacturing evidence about the recent Delhi pogroms in the first half of this absurd year.

Aracelis Girmay writes about her wonder at the endurance of the human soul -

“I am amazed by how much people can survive, endure—and how they can go on living, laughing. After thorough devastation, indescribable loss, people’s hearts still beat. People can, still, live. This is perplexing, bewildering news to me. Defies all sense and gravity to me. And yet.

When I see people living—and we do! we do everyday!—in and through and around all kinds of circumstances, I am in love and want to know, how, how?”

Margaret Atwood talks about her journey in poetry - “I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me.” This poem is infused with a feeling of sublime love, of revolutionary romance that makes as it seeks.

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