Improv/Imitation 1, Week 9

"It is late on the evening of September 25, 2006,"
and tambourines beat less loudly against my skull then,
making real music to dance to rather than pounding like
my mother's heavy footsteps above my basement room.
Can you hear me now, or was that Are You There, God;
It's me, Margaret, a novel I once taught to our
Christian Fellowship Club when it was my turn to preach,
a feat not unlike a woman wearing pants or unfastening
her hair to dare speak all the details of rebellion
that Margaret Atwood taught us in our formative years:
those of early college, when, as child-adults, we hung
against the dripping words of writers like our own
Bible, one without scripture but shouting sarcasm in
the fisted hands of Margaret Atwood herself.
Is Margaret Atwood the same who wrote to God all those
years ago, those years before impressionism overtook my
mind and turned me against men like Offred's mother,
when my eyes so easily turned to the Man for his answer
to every question that anyone could have asked aloud?
Imagine how different such a book would read now:
Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret Atwood