“Night Terrors,” a Poem by Sharon Olds
From the 45th Anniversary Edition from “Satan Says”
She has so strongly this sense of someone coming after her,
someone dark or dressed in dark clothes,
some man so angry, so clever, there is no
chance of survival.
Every night she tries to think of something that would
get him to spare the children.
Every night she feels him outside the house,
eyeing its surface milky as a body,
the strips of its roof like hair oiled and combed,
all the stiff apertures
Victorian, like a frightened woman
on her wedding night, like her own mother entered and
entered by that man she hated, his hair
black as the polished barrel of a gun.
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“Night Terrors” from Satan Says, by Sharon Olds. Copyright 1980. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the author of thirteen books of poetry, most recently Balladz, a finalist for the National Book Award; Arias, short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize; Odes; and Stag’s Leap, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Her other honors include the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. The Father was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City.
