Circle words

My current preoccupation with circles has led me to search out poetry on the subject.

I came across this fragment from a much longer poem by Margaret Attwood on the Poetry Foundation website. I must confess I had not read any of her poems before but this one seemed to say something to me about the never-ending and hypnotic nature of the circle and its mysteries.

It is shown with some small snippets from my sketchbook.

 From ...

The circle game 
by Margaret Attwood

i

The children on the lawn
joined hand to hand
go round and round

each arm going into the next arm,

around full circle
until it comes
back into each of the single
bodies again

They are singing, but
not to each other:
their feet move
almost in time to the singing

We can see

the concentration on
their faces, their eyes
fixed on the empty
moving spaces just in
front of them.

We might mistake this
tranced moving for joy
but there is no joy in it

We can see (arm in arm)

as we watch them go
round and round
intent, almost
studious (the grass
underfoot ignored, the trees
circling the lawn
ignored, the lake ignored)
that the whole point
for them
of going round and round
is (faster
      slower)
going round and round .....