Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Notes
Ada Limón's The Conditional asked how we might love someone in a world threatened by catastrophe. Maggie Smith's Good Bones takes that anxiety a generation further. How do we persuade our children that the world is worth loving when we ourselves have seen so much of its cruelty? Smith imagines the world as a house with good bones, something a determined realtor might still convince us to buy despite its many defects. There is a quiet contradiction in raising children. We want them to recognize injustice without becoming overwhelmed by it, to understand suffering without losing their capacity for wonder. Hope becomes an act of responsibility, sustained even when our own convictions begin to falter. October's Decay leaves us with this difficult possibility. Perhaps we cannot promise the next generation a better world, but we can refuse to treat its deterioration as inevitable. The house may be falling apart, yet there is still something worth preserving, and perhaps something worth rebuilding. #MaggieSmith #ContemporaryPoetry #AmericanLiterature #PoliticalPoetry #HopeAndDespair
Maggie Smith, “Good Bones” from Good Bones: Poems. Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Smith.