"Leningrad Cemetery, Winter of 1941", Sharon Olds

Bio: Sharon Olds (1942) has won awards such as the Pulitzer Pruse and the National Book Critics Circle Award for works that critics refer to as "controversial". She most frequently wrote about intimate details relating yo herself, such as her children, strained relationships with her parents, and her sex life. While some criticize her work as "pornographic", others see it as expressing the "unpoetic" pmoments of life, the things not usually written about in poetry. 

Leningrad Cemetery, Winter of 1941

That winter, the dead could not be buried.

The ground was frozen, the gravediggers weak from hunger,

The coffin wood used for fuel. So they were covered with something 

And taken on a child's sled to the cemetery

In the sub-zero air. They lay on the soil,

Some of them wrapped in dark cloth 

Bound with rope like the tree's ball of roots 

When it waits to be planted; others wound in sheets,

Their pale, gauze, tapered shapes 

Stiff as cocoons that will split down the center

When the new life inside is prepared; 

But most lay like corpses, their coverings 

Coming undone, naked calves

Hard as corded wood spilling 

From under a cloak, a hand reaching out

With no sign of peace, wanting to come back 

Even to the bread made of glue and sawdust,

Even to the icy winter, and the siege. 

Olds uses many metaphors in this work to give a more clearly defined mental image of the scene she is viewing. The fact that she starts with a sentence clarifying that there are several dead bodies that cannot be buried gives us, from our common knowledge, an automatic image of the Holocaust, or one similar, while still telling us that the scene takes place in Leningrad. She describes groups of the bodies to us, since she can see them laying on the ground in the snow; she describes some as "bound with rope like the tree's ball of roots when it is to be planted" (7-8), and others as "stiff as cocoons that will split down the center when the new life inside is prepared" (10-11). The irony in the last statement, however is that although they look like cocoons with new life inside them, unless you count this as being a metaphor for the afterlife, there is no physical life inside the wrapped corpses at all. She also describes the bodies as "hard as corded wood" (14), giving us an image of bodies that not only have already rotted from days of decay, but have also been frozen solid by the frozen tundra of the Soviet Union. She also draws us a picture of the bodies reaching out for help under the blankets and sheets, as if asking us to help them back to life. She uses the diction "a hand reaching out with no sign of peace, wanting to come back"(15-16), almost insinuating that while they were being tortured with sub-zero temperatures and "bread made of glue and sawdust" (17-18), the afterlife they have been sent to is not any better, and Olds sees this as a plee to come back to this life, despite the tortures they would face.