Corpse Song
Corpse Song - meaning Summary
A Warning from Beyond
The poem presents a speaker who returns like a smuggler in the night to deliver unwanted news: the living will lose their voice. The speaker describes a posthumous, objectified existence—mistaken for a coat, a ventriloquist’s trick—caught between two places. They urge the reader to sing while they still can and to pray for the speaker not as an image but as they truly are. Themes include voicelessness, transformation, and plea for recognition.
Read Complete AnalysesI enter your night like a darkened boat, a smuggler These lanterns, my eyes and heart are out I bring you something you do not want: news of the country I am trapped in, news of your future: soon you will have no voice I resent your skin, I resent your lungs, your glib assumptions Therefore sing now while you have the choice My body turned against me too soon, it was not a tragedy I did not become a tree or a constellation I became a winter coat the children thought they saw on the street corner I became this illusion, this trick of ventriloquism this blind noun, this bandage crumpled at your dream’s edge or you will drift as I do from head to head swollen with words you never said, swollen with hoarded love. I exist in two places, here and where you are. Pray for me not as I am but as I am.
"I exist in two places, here and where you are. Pray for me not as I am but as I am." - Margaret Atwood, Poetry Verse
this is so beautiful!