Poetry Thursday: Margaret Atwood, "Marrying the Hangman"

It's been a week of hangings in America. Gingrich still hanging around after Florida, the other candidates hanging blame and shame, but worst of all--most surprising, but why did we find it surprising?--the most squeaky-pink and prominent Big Girl in the Cancer Wars hanging women with no primary care out to dry because those women have a Planned Parenthood in their neighborhoods.

But enough about justice and injustice. Enough about arrogance and traps. We need a little poetry. We need an escape.

So, they say, did the woman who married the hangman:


"My friends, who are both women, tell me their stories, 
which cannot be believed and which are true. They 
are horror stories and they have not happened to me, 
they have not yet happened to me, they have 
happened to me but we are detached, we watch our 
unbelief with horror. Such things cannot happen to 
us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in 
the afternoon. The trouble was, she said, I didn’t 
have time to put my glasses on and without them I’m 
blind as a bat, I couldn’t even see who it was. These 
things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories 
about them so we can finally believe. This is not 
fantasy, it is history, there is more than one hangman 
and because of this some of them are unemployed...." 

--Margaret Atwood, "Marrying the Hangman"

By comparison, that pink noose was a pretty good choice for a woman deprived of choices. 

(I blogged here last week about the economics of choice for women and girls.)