Poetry Project

Anniversary (poetic response to Photograph of the Girl by Sharon Olds)

Their wrinkled hands,

as gnarled as the wood bench they sit on,

greets the other’s with a familiar embrace

of forty years.

Today.

And as the soldiers yell,

and their grandchildren cry

and their spirits fall as steadily as the rain that serves for a lullaby,

they turn to each other.

For even though,

the ring was taken,

and a new war waged,

the silver sold,

and more beliefs caged,

the dress tarnished,

and crashes and booms,

the flowers rotten,

and an upcoming doom.

Love lives on.

What really struck me about Photograph of the Girl by Sharon Olds was the process of puberty competing with the process of starvation. In my poem, I compared how despite terrible circumstances, regular life events such as falling in love, changing internally, or in this case the event of an anniversary, still persists. I used simile and enjambment in the first stanza, simile in the second, rhyme and onomatopoeia, and stanza overall as literary devices.

47th Street

The melodious beats of Joni Mitchell 

trickle in from the bright orange crack

underneath my sister’s door that resembles

a sliver of sunset.

I hear the ever present honks from fifth avenue

that erupt from darkened cars

and the sound of ice breaking

under the feet of late night wanderers.

I hear the friction of my ear against my pillow

and scoot my feet

down

down

down

so the bedroom air greets my toes

with a frigid embrace.

But all this thaws

as the tempo of my heart slows

down

down

down

to a lullaby.

This poem was rather easy to compose because all I had to think of what I hear overnight, every other week. Sunset Park never sleeps and it seems like there is always hubbub on fifth avenue. In this free verse poem I used repetition of down, speaker, imagery and a very obvious allusion to Joni Mitchell.

Sonnet: A Questioned Desire

I wish to live a life I have not known,

far from the cars and trains I ride daily.

And except for the flowers, all alone.

Free to frolic around the land gayly.

Fore the only creatures that I do see

are rats that crawl beneath forgotten tracks

and birds that chirp by trash with hollow glee.

But could I live with life enclosed in packs?

To survive a wild all alone?

I love my bed and feather pillow,

which both reside in my Park Slope home.

Is it the same to lie under willow?

Nevertheless, if I should have to run,

it shall be under a radiant sun.

In all honesty, writing a sonnet was hard. I would think of a line and when it didn’t meet the criteria, I had to start from scratch. However, when a line did work, I felt a light wash of success. Also, because of the rigid structure, if one sticks to it, whatever work produced will have some artistry in it. I used the literary devices of alliteration (free, frolic,) speaker, rhyme, rhythm, and stanza.

Heart Poem: Photograph of the Girl by Sharon Olds

The girl sits on the hard ground,

the dry pan of Russia, in the drought

of 1921 stunned,

eyes closed, mouth open,

raw hot wind blowing

sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are

taking her together. She leans on a sack,

layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,

the new radius of her arm curved.

She cannot be beautiful, but she is

starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones

grow longer, porous. The caption says 

she is going to starve to death that winter

with millions of others. Deep in her body 

the ovaries let out her first eggs,

golden as drops of rain.

Connection- The poem connects to me because as an adolescent, I’m experiencing the same changes as the girl in the photograph. However, she must handle this uncharted territory in a much less comfortable setting than a house in Park Slope, Brooklyn. 

Reading Response-

Upon receiving the poetry packet, I thumbed through the various pages. Some poems took up whole pages, the haikus took up fractions of pages, and nestled in the corner of one page was Photograph of the Girl by Sharon Olds. At sixteen lines it was similar to length of poems I had previously written this unit; not too long and not too short. After reading the poem I liked it even more. Olds’ frank but eloquent and vivid observations resembled my writing, or rather what I wanted my writing to be.

The poem describes a photograph of a Russian girl in 1921 experiencing two processes; starvation and puberty, both of which Olds portrays. For example, at the conclusion of the poem it is stated that, “Deep in her body the ovaries let out her first eggs, golden as drops of rain.” This describes the start of menstruation, a component of becoming a woman because of the ability to conceive a child. Aside from stating that the girl is going through puberty, Olds celebrates it, using simile to describe eggs as equally as gold as drops of rain. Earlier in the poem Olds mentions the 1921 drought. In that instance rain is needed and revered, and Olds deems the girl’s eggs of the same quality. To continue, the girl is also fighting starvation. This is stated in the caption of the photo, clearly stating the hardships of Russia during the early 1900’s.

However, the two processes are also fighting each other.  “Each day she grows thinner, and her bones grow longer, porous.” While the absence of nutrition is reducing her width, the girl’s length is increasing. Starvation is trying to make her disappear but growth fights this, stretching her thin skin even thinner over new lengths. Furthermore, Olds continues to describe the new, curved radius of her arm. The word “new” conveys puberty yet the curve shows the lack of body fat, skin having nothing to wrap around but the curve of bone.

This poem illustrates a starving teenager in the most beautiful way possible, which still brings a heavy tinge of sadness to the poem. This girl is growing up in such harsh conditions and I think that puberty is such a developmental time in a girl’s life that having your body and life change at the same time would just turn one’s world upside down. I know that I experienced these physical and mental changes in a really comfortable setting and yet I still felt like I was deserving of pity at some times. If I felt like puberty could be hard, how did the millions of children growing into adults in unstable settings feel?