35/10 by Sharon Olds

In this poem, Sharon Olds contemplates the ideas of getting older and approaching death.  It is when the speaker of the poem is brushing her daughter's hair that she herself notices her hair becoming gray with age.  Although she could view this as a positive aspect of her life, since with age comes wisdom and knowledge, the speaker takes this as a sign of her numbered days and mortality.  Instead of viewing aging as the growth and maturing of her mind and soul, she views it as a decay of her body, especially through comparison to her young daughter: "As my skin shows its dry pitting, she opens like a moist precise flower on the tip of a cactus."  The speaker describes her aging as dangerous and unmanageable, like a pit.  She describes her daughter's aging and maturing as beautiful and natural, like a flower.  Although, the flower is surrounded by the dangerous spikes of a cactus, possibly showing how this beautiful maturing will inevitably become something bad and dangerous: the decay of body and soul.  In the end, the speaker of the poem views aging in a selfish manner, claiming that growing old and eventually dying is simply a means of replacing mother with daughter, old with new.