"The Worker"

Click here to listen to Sharon Olds read this poem.


Nothing had been burned with my mother,
even the tiny, blue snowflakes
of her cotton hospital gown the floor-nurse took
back, and kept. The rows of tongues of
flame inside the mortuary
incinerator were given bone,
flesh, blood, wedding ring
and hair. Suddenly I'm glad I do not
have that job—mother after
mother after father after
father, a child, baby, to scrape
out of the firebox into the urethane
urn. I always forget the worker,
the one instead of me who picked that
dewy, rigid corpse up,
and slid it in the body-sack and zipped it to;
the one who lifted it out of the bag
and put it in its tray on the conveyor belt;
the one who pushed the button to move her
into the enclosure; the one who flipped the
switch to fire the jets. For a moment,
I almost see it, my mother's body
made of a feeding frenzy of fire,
and then the scraper scrapes her—and a few
ashes of the one before, and a grain
of the one before that, and the one before that—
into the box, and the secretary
labels it, and puts it in the ball-bearing
file drawer, by her desk, and the little
carton of my mom abides, the office
calendar page of April is torn,
May, June, July, August,
out she rolls, I do my amateur
teamster featherbedding, the minister
does his work of magic respect,
taking the heat of the eternal for the rest of us whose
fingertips and nails break into the
harsh, purplish, Molokai sand
and convey a handful out over the rail and
give her to the wind and sea,
roughage for the fishes' work of
seeding the deep, we give her to the
hard-laboring moon, we give her
leave, and permanent furlough.

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