Capturing Sharon Olds' Poem

I Go Back to May 1937


I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges
I see my father strolling out under an 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. . . . 


I say. . .  do what you are going to do,
and I will tell about it.

                                                                                    Sharon Olds,

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