a poem by margaret atwood

Cell

Now look objectively.  You have to
admit the cancer cell is beautiful.
If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty, 
with its mauve centre and pink petals

or if a cover for a pulpy thirties
sci-fi magazine, How striking;
as an alien, a success,
all purple eye and jelly tentacles
and spines, or are they gills,
creeping around on granular Martian
dirt red as the inside of the body,

while its tender walls
expand and burst, its spores
scatter elsewhere, take root, like money,
drifting like a fiction or
miasma in and out of people's
brains, digging themselves
industriously in.  The lab technician

says, It has forgotten
how to die.  But why remember?  All it wants is more
amnesia.  More life, and more abundantly.  To take
more.  To eat more.  To replicate itself.  To keep on
doing those things forever.  Such desires
are not unknown.  Look in the mirror.


.