Ode of Girls’ Things by Sharon Olds

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend December 21, 2015   Ode of Girls’ Things   Sharon Olds

I loved the things that were ours—pink gloves, hankies with a pastoral scene in one corner. There was a lot we were not allowed to do, but what we were allowed to do was ours, dolls you carry by the leg, and dolls’  clothes you would put on or take off— someone who was yours, who did not have the rights of her own nakedness, and who had a smooth body, with its untouchable place, which you would never touch, even on her, you         had been cured of that. And some of the dolls had hard-rubber hands, with dimples, and though you were not supposed to, you could bite off the ends of the fingers when you could not stand it. And though you’d never be allowed to, say, drive a bus, or do anything that had to be done right, there was a teeny carton, in you, of eggs so tiny they were invisible. And there would be milk, in you, too—real milk! And you could wear a skirt, you could   be a bellflower—up under its cone the little shape like a closed buckle, intricate groove and tongue, where something like God’s power over you lived. And it turned out you shared some things with boys— the alphabet was not just theirs— and you could make forays over into their territory, you could have what you could have because it was yours, and a little of what was theirs, because you took it. Much later, you’d have to give things up, too, to make it fair—long hair, skirts, even breasts, a pair of raspberry colored pumps which a friend wanted to put on, if they would fit his foot, and they did.            Copyright © 2015 by Sharon Olds. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “There are some truths in our lives so obvious to us they might not seem interesting enough for a poem. But if we have passionate feelings about something, it is engaging for us to write about it! And the more odes I wrote, the more often some of them wanted to have one long line—in this case maybe eight accents, which in one sense is just two of my four beats put together, but I do like the rush when that happens.” —Sharon Olds   Sharon Olds is the author of Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. She holds the Erich Maria Remarque Professorship at New York University’s Creative Writing Program.   Photo credit: Brian Palmer Poetry by Olds   Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012) "Let Everything Happen to You" by Natalie Eilbert "The Woodlice" by Aracelis Girmay "Lullaby in Blue" by Betsy Sholl Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038