The Month of June: 13 1/2

As our daughter approaches graduation and

puberty at the same time, at her

own, calm, deliberate, serious rate,

she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her

hands, thrust out her hipbones, chant

I’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming

open around her, a chrysalis cracking and

letting her out, it falls behind her and

joins the other husks on the ground,

7th grade, 6th grade, the

magenta rind of 5th grade, the

hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,

3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of

1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and

kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket

taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.

The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a

cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her

jerky sexy child’s joke dance of

self, self, her throat tight and a

hard new song coming out of it, while her

two dark eyes shine

above her body like a good mother and a

good father who look down and

love everything their baby does, the way she

lives their love.

Copyright Credit: Sharon Olds, “The Month of June: 13 1/2” from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. Copyright © 2004 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: Poetry (September 1983)