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
What would we do if we knew the world was ending? In Ada Limón's The Conditional, the possibility of catastrophe becomes an intimate conversation between two people. Against the imagined destruction of the world, the poem turns toward something remarkably ordinary, the desire to remain together, to hold onto another person while everything familiar becomes uncertain. We often imagine hope as confidence that tomorrow will be better. Yet loving someone requires no such guarantee. Every relationship exists under conditions we cannot control, shaped by time, mortality, and the possibility of sudden loss. Perhaps tenderness becomes most meaningful when we recognize how little permanence we can promise each other. As October's Decay approaches its end, Limón offers a quieter form of resistance to despair. The future may remain uncertain, and the world may offer little reassurance, but we can still choose how to inhabit the present. Sometimes hope begins with the simple wish to stay beside someone a little longer. #AdaLimon #ContemporaryPoetry #AmericanPoetry #Existentialism #LoveAndMortality
Maggie Smith, “Good Bones” from Good Bones: Poems. Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Smith.