Strike Sparks Quotes

“I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have-as if it were our duty
to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.”
― Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002

“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, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002