Olds is best known for her often brutal confessional poetry, but one of my favorite poems -- written during those prime years and often overlooked -- is this one, about watching your kid heal. As someone who's also had a daughter break a limb, this process of watching the cast itself be destroyed to reveal a healed limb and to see your child's happiness and astonishment resonates a lot with me (and a lot of parents, I suspect).

The Cast --Sharon Olds

When the doctor cut off my son’s cast the high scream of the saw filled the room and the boy’s lap was covered with fluff like the chaff of a new thing emerging, the down in the hen-yard. Down the seam that runs along the outside of the arm and up the seam along the inside — that line where the colour of a white boy’s arm changes like a fish from belly-white to prismatic, the saw ranged freely — the saw that does not cut flesh, the doctor told us, smiling. Then the horrible shriek ran down in a moment to nothing and he took a sharp silver wedge like a can-opener and jimmied at the cracks until with a creak the glossy white false arm cracked and there lay the kid’s sweet dirty forearm, thin as a darkened twig. He lifted it in astonishment, like a gift, It’s so light! he cried, a lot of light coming out of his eyes, he fingered it and grinned, he picked up the halves and put them together and gripped it and carried it out through the waiting room and everyone smiled the way you smile at a wedding, so deep in us the desire to be healed and joined.