I just discovered this poem and poet, I am kind of dumbfounded by her words, such gorgeous language. Just wanted to share.
I Go Back to May 1937
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it--she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don't do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Gawd....this has left me with a very disturbed feeling as we were just talking about marriages that should never have happened while at work today......and the devastation they can leave behind in the children they produce.
__________________
"Love one another but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls" ~~~~Khalil Gibran~~~~
Wow....Some art hurts and this is a good example of it in poetry, right? I have not read all of her works but from what I have read, I feel Sharon Olds' poetry is very pure, like fire, potent and intense and often painful and harrowing...i'd even go so far as to say brutal..it's not exactly light and beautiful:...yet beautiful in other ways...always compelling and for me profoundly cathartic in many respects. Much of her poetry appears on the surface to be autobiographical but perhaps more she is channeling a collective energy..her themes of domestic violence and sexuality have this honesty about them. This poem really hurts and sometimes that is a good thing because it helps to release pain. She also has a very wicked sense of humour and i think she's a brilliant unique artist whose strength I admire very much. Thanks for sharing Lady True...it's very powerful writing...But... a bit like watching Leaving Las Vegas, reading her poems is something I don't choose to do flippantly or frequently, because it really is harrowing..worthy of a celebration of the power of language though! She reminds me alot of Sylvia Plath, another poet I admire but whose poetry I would not read for a pick me up!
