Explication of poem "35/10"

Sharon Old’s poem “35/10” is a poem that outlines a scene involving mother and daughter. The speaker, a mother, brushes out the hair of her young daughter and reflects on the differences the two share, particularly the child’s youth and her aging. The title “35/10” presents the central meaning of the novel, that being a side-by-side comparison of the mother (age 35) and her daughter (age 10). The first contrast of the poem is the girl’s “brown/silken hair” and the speaker’s “grey gleaming” atop her scalp. The woman describes herself a “silver-haired servant behind her,” using the term silver to further display her graying hair and calls herself a servant because it provides not only the connotation that she cares for her but that her looks are bellow her daughter’s, even placing herself “behind” her in both physical senses of the word. The poet describes her neck folds as “clarifying,” while her child’s “fine bones of her/hips sharpen,” to show that both females are gaining more plainly seen characteristics but the mother’s age is growing more clear, while her daughter’s woman-hood and thin frame are now in sharper focus. The contrasting continues with the lines “As my skin shows/its dry pitting, she opens like a moist/precise flower on the tip of a cactus.” The speaker describes herself as a dry pit and her daughter is seen as a “moist…flower.” The use of flower can be read with differing connotations. Firstly, flowers are a symbol of beauty, something that the girl has recently acquired. The symbol is also a reference to the youth’s virginity, a trait that stands precarious, as if on the thorny top of a cactus plant. This idea of child-bearing is reinforced with the next lines that compare the speaker’s “falling” ova that are more likely to be a “[duds]” and her girl’s “purse of eggs, round and/firm as hard-boiled yolks“ which “is about/ to snap its clasp.” The final lines depict the narrator’s attitude to the shift between the two, saying “It's an old/ story—the oldest we have on our planet—/the story of replacement.” To the author, she is bitter and resigned to the change, citing that her youth and beauty is easily interchanged with her daughter’s and that this shift is as old as time itself.