I Go Back to 1937 by Sharon Olds

I Go Back to May 1937

by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the   

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

take them up like the male and female   

paper dolls and bang them together   

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

This poem is from Sharon Olds' book The Gold Cell (Knopf, 1987).

The title and the first 12 lines--lines which set the scene and introduce the speaker's parents as college students--introduce a romantic vision of the past. These lines are also made up of just one sentence.

 The 13th line's last word--"Stop"--stomps on all of that, and the speaker gets more brutal after that. Quickly.

First, they are just the wrong woman and the wrong man. Then we get vague details (yes, I am aware that is an oxymoron).

you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die.

I cannot imagine anyone ignoring a warning from the future like this. You are going to do bad things to children is enough of a detail as I need--my imagination can fill in awful examples of the bad things parents do to their children.

The speaker states she wants to do this, to go back in time and stop their marriage. But then she admits "I want to live." Of course she does. Olds has written about her upbringing--strict, unforgiving religion that restricted, controlled, and censored; an abusive, alcoholic father; a weak mother who hid behind morality and Calvinist tradition. These are not things anyone would wish on anyone.

But as with all of our past hurts, from the mild to the traumatic and life-altering, we are who we are because of them. In the last line, the speaker seems to offer a compromise, since she cannot/will not go back in time and keep her parents apart. Everything will happen just as it had, and she will write about it (which, of course, Olds does).

Olds has said, and it is apparent in poems like these, that she seeks to understand her parents. She appears to have resisted a lifetime of anger and recrimination, which many children of abusive parents struggle with. But in this poem, the speaker realizes that without her parents, seriously flawed as they were, she would not exist. So keeping them apart would just erase her and her siblings and--to keep this train of thought going--create two families (instead of one) where abuse would harm children. Yes, it is moot, but there is also a deep and peace-seeking acceptance of circumstance in this poem which I find both amazing and incredibly admirable.

In an interview for Bomb Magazine with Amy Hempel, Hempel reminds Olds that she has said, "Writing poems moves us past where we were when we sat down to write them." Like much of Olds' poetry, this is simple and brilliant simultaneously. Your first reaction is, "well, yes, of course." Then you think about it and realize how important and true this is, how complicated and real and magical.

You can read the entire interview with Hempel and Olds here.