Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco in 1942 and was raised, as she describes it, “as a hellfire Calvinist.” She received a BA from Stanford University and a PhD from Columbia University and has taught at New York University since 1987. Olds has published several collections of poems to considerable acclaim. Her first collection, Satan Says (1980), won the San Francisco Poetry Center Award, and The Dead and the Living (1983) won the 1983 Lamont Poetry Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Nine additional collections of her work have been published in English, and her poems have been widely translated. Her most recent volume, One Secret Thing, was published in 2008.

Rite of Passage

“Rite of Passage” was published in The Dead and the Living. In it, Olds examines a critical rite of passage for a young man: the birthday party.

As the guests arrive at my son’s party

they gather in the living room—

short men, men in first grade

with smooth jaws and chins.

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Hands in pockets, they stand around

jostling, jockeying for place, small fights

breaking out and calming. One says to another

How old are you? Six. I’m seven. So?

They eye each other, seeing themselves

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tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their

throats a lot, a room of small bankers,

they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you

up, a seven says to a six,

the dark cake, round and heavy as a

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turret, behind them on the table. My son,

freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,

chest narrow as the balsa keel of a

model boat, long hands

cool and thin as the day they guided him

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out of me, speaks up as a host

for the sake of the group.

We could easily kill a two-year-old,

he says in his clear voice. The other

men agree, they clear their throats

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like Generals, they relax and get down to

playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

(1983)