"Don't do it"

On January 23, I posted Gail Collins' fantasy of going back in time to deliver messages. Here is another fantasy of carrying messages back to the past, one with an entirely different flavor. The narrator of Sharon Olds' poem imagines her parents meeting:

...they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,...

Read the entire poem here.