Sharon Olds, "Elder Sister"

This poem still chokes me up. It makes me think both literally and figuratively about the paths my sister and "sisters" made for me, making my walk through life so much easier:

Elder Sister
by Sharon Olds
In The Dead and the Living: Poems by Sharon Olds. Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

When I look at my elder sister now
I think of how she had to go first, down through the
birth canal, to force her way
head-first through the tiny channel,
the pressure of Mother's muscles on her brain,
the tight walls scraping her skin.
Her face is still  narrow from it, the long
hollow cheeks of a Crusader on a tomb,
and her inky eyes have the look of someone who has
been in prison a long time and
 knows they can send her back. I look at her
body and think how her breasts were the first to

rise, slowly, like swans on a pond.
By the time mine came along, they were just

two more birds in the flock, and when the hair

rose on the white mound of her flesh, like

threads of water out of the ground, it was the

first time, but when mine came
they knew about it. I used to think
only in terms of her harshness, sitting and
pissing on me in bed, but now I
see I had her before me always
like a shield. .I look at her wrinkles, her clenched

jaw, her frown-lines--I see they are
the dents on my shield, the blows that did not reach me.
She protected me, not as a mother
protects a child, with love, but as a

hostage protects the one who makes her
escape as I made my escape, with my sister's

body held in front of me.