poetry lamenting war #16

[truepenny]

Nevsky Prospect

(July 1917)

It is an old photo, very black and
very white. One woman
lifts up her heavy skirt as she runs.
A man in a white jacket, his hands
tied behind his back, runs,
his chin stuck out. An old woman
in massive black turns and looks behind her.
A man throws himself onto the pavement.
A child in heavy boots is running
but looks back over his shoulder
at the black and white heap of bodies.
The wide gray stone square
is dotted with fallen inky shapes
and dropped white hats. Everything else is
heaving away like a sea from the noise we
feel in the silence of the photograph
the way the deaf see sound: the terrible
voice of the submachine guns saying,
This is more important than your life.

--Sharon Olds, The Dead and the Living. 1984. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

LINKS:
Biography from the New York State Writers Institute.

And the Academy of American Poets has their shit back together. Here's their page on Olds.

MAPS again with the secondary sources.