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Need help recognising this poem and the poet!


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Hi guys!

 

My problem is this: I had to learn a poem by heart years ago for uni. I loved the poem and I would like to find it again. The problem is I don't remember the poet and I only have the poem's name which is "The Healer". I tried googling but all The Healer poems were religious poems and my poem was not like that. I remember a couple of the lines, they went something like this:

 

Sometimes I think my life's over

That there will be repetition

But no more story.

 

I also remember the narrator saying something about churchgoers who were passing by, and I think the narrator might have been outside doing something, maybe something to do with flowers? But that's all I have. And those lines produce nothing on google.

 

Anyone got any ideas as to who's poem I'm referring to? I'm dying to find this poem! :D

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  • 5 months later...

Phew, I got it! My friend tracked down the poem using a kind of an Ask a Librarian -service and found out that the poem is indeed The Healer and it's by Margaret Atwood (you would've thought that I would've remembered such a well-known poet...!) and it's found at least in the collection "Interlunar".

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Here's finally the poem you have all been waiting for, and which I've tried to hunt down for maybe 5 years! :D

 

Margaret Atwood:

 

The Healer

 

I do not wish to spend the rest of my time

curing nosebleeds over the phone. Nobody here

needs anyone raised from the dead, it's too

confusing, with the notices

already sent and so forth. Asthma and bruises, warts

dissolved in moonlight, a touch and it's done.

Anything worse and they'll call the doctor.

Suffering is boring,

though noticing this does not make it end.

There are so many other things I could be doing

with my hands: digging up the garden,

digging up the garden again.

Sometimes I think my life is over and there will be

repetition but no more story.

Only these compassions, which are also minor.

 

I should be elsewhere, away from these

neat farms, living among the people in dust-floored

shacks who could still believe me.

But I am old and lazy now. I know that

being sick and being well are states

of the soul, though I am losing

ground, call it altitude, call it faith.

The power is in me, but what for?

What am I to do with my hands in this tidy place

filled with those who do not want

to be truly healed?

 

Such arrogance, to have expected miracles.

What was it anyway I thought flowed through me?

Perhaps it was only a slight talent, this tinkering

with the small breaks and fissures in other bodies,

like a knack for crewel-work.

 

Sundays I putter in the yard, arranging stones,

raking grass, and the church-goers pass me,

radiating their special hatreds.

In the evenings I sit on the back porch

in a stuffed chair covered with blue cloth

printed with flowers, and look out

across the ragged fields at the real

flowers, goldenrod and purple asters,

the light spilling out of them

unasked for and unused.

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