Happy Wednesday

Happy Wednesday everybody. Nothing new with me. So here's a poem by Sharon Olds:

Photograph of the girl


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 not 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 grain.


~Sharon Olds
From The Dead and the Living