"The Victims" by Sharon Olds

Sharon Olds is an American poet who was born 19 November 1942 in San Francisco. She received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980. She teaches creative writing at New York University.

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it, in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away,
your secretaries taken away,
your lunches with three double bourbons,
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcasses hung in your closet, and the black
noses of your shoes with their large pores?
She had taught us to take us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the stained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing
left but this.

Perhaps one of the most important things to note about this poem is the lack of a constant meter. This poem is filled with enjambment that carries us through the story being told, but it also stresses an important aspect. All of the lines are staggered, expressing that they can be viewed as staggered, incomplete thoughts. The majority of the poem is a reflection of the past, with the speaker's tone changing towards the end, showing that time has passed and that the speaker has different thoughts now.
Lines one through seventeen have an almost victorious tone throughout. The speaker is recalling how there was gladness when the mother divorced the children's father. "[H]er kids loved it," because their mother "took it and took it, in silence, all those years" and now she had finally stood up for herself. Her mother had been a victim of her husband, and because of this, the children were victims too. It is easy to see that the children felt that everything that happened to their father afterwards, from losing his job to losing his fancy clothing, was justified for the way he treated them and their mother.
Then again, in the middle of line seventeen, the father is actually mentioned as that. Before, it was just "you," the identification of having this "father" too horrible to be given acknowledgement. After line seventeen, the thoughts become less staggered, and in fact, they are formulated into one seemingly coherent sentence. Here, the tone changes to sympathetic; it is softer and more gentle. Rather than resent the father, the speaker actually identifies a sort of compassion for all the "bums in the doorways" who have lost everything because of the decisions of others.
The biggest theme in this poem is the emphasis that everyone is a victim of something. The beginning of the poem makes the mother and children the victims; the end of the poem shows the father being a victim. Overall, though, it is plausible to recognize that the father is the true victim. This does not justify the fact that he could have been aggressive and harsh to his wife, because the wife and the children "took it and took it" for years. Yet as the speaker reflects in the end with "until they had given it all away and had nothing left but this," there is the possibility that the father was doing everything with his job and his luxurious lifestyle for his family. The job and the secretaries all made it possible for him to provide a good life for his family. With all of that gone, he lost everything his life was built around. It is implied that sometimes people give everything they have for others, but the others will victimize them in the end.