Sample Poems by Sharon Olson

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A New Friend

for Peggy, 1915-1995, Drew Farm

He took me there to meet his mother.
The farmhouse hugged the brim of the hill.
Nerve-wracking, really, whether I would be accepted.

The first afternoon I slipped away, found a place
that seemed right to me, lay down in the high grass.
The ground was hard at first but my spine adjusted,
a few times inching up and back until I noticed
a settling in of sorts, and a shifting in my head
of the far-off hills I saw before I stretched out,
as they dipped out of sight.

The night before I heard the frogs
on the way up the road, peepers they call them,
how they stopped when we approached,
and then one would start up again, and after
several minutes another one would answer,
until the whole pondful got going again,
a peepers symphonic poem gathering velocity.

The last morning, after we cleared the breakfast
dishes away, she and I found ourselves sitting together
in the dining room, and she wanted to know if I had
read Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which I hadn't,
and it was so vivid for her, how they brought skins
down to the beach to dry before they would be loaded
onto the ships, on nineteenth century California beaches,
the intricacy of the detail. I thought then we might
be friends, and she smiled, said she had noticed
me lying out there in the grass. Like it was the proper
thing to do. And I had done it. And there was so
little time. By next summer she would be gone.

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That Day

Auden wrote about my brother,
the way no one saw his plane go down.
No image survives, no Kodachrome
or Brownie print, no news flash
or YouTube clip, no time machine
to take me back to April 13, 1953,
his 21st birthday, going up
in the plane he had so recently
purchased, and couldn't wait.
Someone standing alongside his car
at ocean's edge might have seen him
but looked away, and when he looked
back again the thing was gone,
and he didn't puzzle over how much time
had passed, or where a plane could have
disappeared, around the back
side of a cliff, for example,
like a page had turned and all
the words that came before
were gone, tabula rasa, not even
the remnants of something erased,
palimpsest, a clue, a morsel,
talisman, touchstone,
hand of my brother on my forehead
as I went to sleep.

---

The Two Cakes

We couldn't believe how easy it was,
the recipe from the newspaper said
to heat some white sugar in a pan,
watch it closely so it wouldn't burn,
and it would turn into a dark syrup
called burnt sugar, and some of it
would go into the cake, mixed with
real butter and cake flour, and some
of it would go into the icing, so sweet
I would chase it with iced cola when
I sat with my mother in the kitchen
after school, and it became a success
for her, a signature cake she would
produce for company, or just for us,
on Sundays, an exercise that helped her
forget the other cake she used to make,
the lemon-frosted angel food my older
brother loved, especially the one
she sent him on his twenty-first birthday,
for which he thanked her in a letter,
his last. She showed it to me recently,
then it was put away.

---

Council of Five

I think of them as my adversaries, seen
in an early family photo they sit graciously
in the backyard, four of them in lawn chairs,
one of my brothers perched on father's lap.

There is no chair for me, no one has given me
a thought, they seem self-satisfied in afternoon sun,
my sister turns one leg up the way she had learned
in modeling, and my mother almost mimics her,
both her legs shifting coyly to the left.

Before I arrived they used to hold weekly meetings,
each child voicing suggestions for improvement,
and they rotated the officers as a training device.

It must have been a shock when my mother
announced my impending arrival. I imagine her
giggling nervously, and my siblings, one by one,
assessing just what this would mean, the group
was just so solidified, and now this incident
of sloppiness-just what were they doing
behind that bedroom door?-now they'd be
scrambling around to find an extra chair.

The party line is they coddled me.
But the family stories were indecipherable.
And I continually found myself walking
into rooms where voices fell silent.
Recipe for an introvert, formula for a poet.