The Green Shirt

I am very ambivalent about starting a blog. It's not so much ambivalence and more about not understanding it. As I've always seen it, journals are private - ways to organize a muddle of thoughts, books to close and hide.
But my friend John pointed out that blogs could be an excellent way of pointing people to publications. And so, this blog was born.

The title? The Green Shirt? Sharon Olds wrote the following poem, entitled "The Green Shirt." It was the first poem that moved me to tears. Still does, every time. As a writer and mother, I am moved by her words, and hope to have the same effect on other readers, somewhere down the line.

The Green Shirt

Sharon Olds

For a week after he breaks his elbow

we don’t think about giving him a bath,

we think about bones twisted like white

saplings in a tornado, tendons

twined around each other like the snakes on the

healer’s caduceus. We think about fractures and

pain, most of the time we think about pain,

and our boy with his pale set face goes

around the house in that green shirt

as if it were his skin, the alligator on it with

wide jaws like the ones pain has

clamped down on his elbow, fine joint that

used to be thin and elegant as

something made with Tinkertoy, then it

swelled to a hard black anvil,

softened to a bruised yellow fruit,

finally we could slip the sleeve over,

and by then our boy was smelling like something

taken from the back of the icebox and

put on the back of the stove. So we stripped him and

slipped him into the tub, he looked so

naked without the sling, just a boy

holding his arm with the other hand as you’d

help an old geezer across the street, and

then it hit us, the man and woman by the

side of the tub, the people who had made him,

then the week passed before our eyes

as the grease slid off him –

the smash, the screaming, the fear he had crushed his

growth-joint, the fear as he lost all the

feeling in two fingers, the blood

pooled in ugly uneven streaks

under the skin in his forearm and then he

lost the use of the whole hand,

and they said he would probably sometime be back to normal,

sometimes, probably, this boy with the long fingers of a surgeon,

this duck sitting in the water with his L-shaped

purple wing in his other hand.

Our eyes fill, we cannot look at each other,

we watch him carefully and kindly soap the damaged arm,

he was given to us perfect, we had sworn no harm

would come to him.