August 8: Scary Poetry, Sharon Olds, "When"

Some of the best poems I've ever written have been about subjects that scare me or make me feel uneasy.  I think it has something to do with the immediacy of emotion.  The urgency of it.  I've written about my brother's death.  My mother's decline in health.  My daughter's growing up.  My wife's mental illness.  Subjects that are raw as a butcher's display case.

Sharon Olds excels at writing about subjects that seem dangerous, taboo, and frightening.  Tonight's poem is one of my favorites.  It seems appropriate to share it tonight, with the Middle East in turmoil, again, and the Ukraine in a state of absolute chaos.

Saint Marty will give this poem his highest compliment:  he wishes had written it.

When

by:  Sharon Olds

I wonder now, only when it will happen,
when the young mother will hear the
noise like somebody's pressure cooker
down the block, going off.  She'll go out in the yard,
holding her small daughter in her arms,
and there, above the end of the street, in the
air above the line of the trees,
she will see it rising, lifting up
over our horizon, the upper rim of the
gold ball, large as a giant
planet starting to lift up over ours.
She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,
looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,
and the child will open her arms to it,
it will look so beautiful.

Terrifying and beautiful