Can anyone help me analyze a poem by one Margaret Atwood? (TPCASTT): "Younger Sister, Going Swim"?

Question

Beside this lake
where there are no other people

my sister in bathing suit continues
her short desolate
parade to the end of the dock;

against the boards
her feet make sad statements
she thinks no one can hear;

(I sit in a deckchair
not counting, invisible;
the sun wavers on
this page as on a pool.)

She moves the raft out
past the sandy point;
no one comes by in a motorboat.

She would like to fill the lake
with other swimmers, with answers.
She calls her name. The sun encloses
rocks, trees, her feet in the water, the circling
bays and hills as before.

She poises, raises her arms
as though signalling, then disappears.
The lake heals itself quietly
of the wound left by the diver.
The air quakes and is still.

(Under my hand the paper
closes over these
marks I am making on it.

The words ripple, subside,
move outwards towards the shore.)

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

First, Margaret Atwood is a world acclaimed poet from Canada.

As to this poem, I think you might be trying to over-analyze it. I read it as her simply re-counting a day at the lake with her younger sister. Her younger sister, on the threshold of becoming a woman instead of a girl, is in need of validation of her desirability, her budding femininity. She wants to be stared at.

Because there are no young guys to show off to on the lake or on shore she feels let down. And the parts of this poem about 'this page' and 'these marks I am making' tell us that the poet is writing the poem as the experience happens, as she is watching her disappointed sister prance around alone, swim alone.