life, too, even if that person has never read or written poetry before. When Kobe Bryant retired, the first thing he did was to write a love poem to basketball. Poetry allows us to express the inexpressible, to bring into essential form thoughts and feelings that have swarmed our mind.
Yet Smith hadn’t been thinking about world events at all while writing those lines in Starbucks. She was thinking about her family. “It was a poem written from the perspective of one mother feeling anxious about how to raise kids, and explain a world to them that is as wonderful as it is terrible,” she told The Washington Post. “How to keep the worst parts from them while they’re young while not lying to them.”
Her four-year-old can’t read yet, so he doesn’t know what the fuss is about. Her daughter, though, is eight, and she has read the poem. They’ve discussed it, a little. “She was really disappointed in the outcome of the election, and we have talked a little bit about when things don’t go our way how we can work small to make big change,” says Smith. “Just doing your best at school, and being kind to others, if we all do those small things, it will make a difference. So that’s sort of my explaining it to an eight-year-old version of things.
“I’ve been writing out of the experience of watching my children read the world like a book they’ve just opened. They are seeing everything for the first time, and through them I am seeing with fresh eyes. They ask pointed questions, like: What is the earth for?”
Smith wrote “Good Bones” with fresh eyes, which explains why it has caught the public imagination and why it is so indelible. The sentiments themselves are hardly original and may not seem especially profound: This is a savage and yet beautiful world. We have only to look around us to know that this is true. Or to watch the Oscar-winning short documentary White Helmets and see Russian pilots with all the time in the world lazily dropping cluster bombs on men in white helmets who have dedicated their lives to rescuing those beneath the rubble of Aleppo. The men in the sky and the men on the ground are in the same movie at the same time.
We know this, except we forget. We do not stop to look around us. Maggie Smith has said that one of her favorite lines is in Ada Limón’s poem “The Same Thing”: “You say you love the world, so love the world.” The way Smith loves the world, she says, is by paying attention, and by finding ways — formally, rhetorically, lyrically — to write about her own experience, on her own terms. She follows, that is to say, in the footsteps of the great Mary Oliver, who in her poem “The Summer Day” writes:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention.
The point of “Good Bones” — and of other poems in this book that address a similar theme, such as Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense” and Wendell Berry’s “Now You Know the Worst”—is not to give us information but a visceral experience of an existential and timeless truth. In his poem “Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” William Carlos Williams writes:
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
“Good Bones” is not meant for the mind alone; it is meant to score a direct hit on the great heart of compassion found in all of us, the broken-open heart willing to pay attention to the unspeakable sorrows of this world, to look on the horrors we visit upon each other and yet to praise this human life anyway. Because this life is all we have.
Or would you rather be a fish and be done with the bother of empathy? Smith makes her choice in this poem, in plain terms. She does it with humor, in terse phrases, and with frequent repetition — not just as a rhythmic device but to drum it into our bones so we do not forget: Life is short. We don’t have time for protracted discussions on the matter or for avoiding what is right before our eyes. Life asks us to open our arms to both the beauty and the beast and to respond in whichever ways our life makes available to us. If you are the captain of a boat on a Greek island, maybe you can rescue refugees from the Mediterranean. If you are a poet, maybe you can write poems. If you are an eight-year-old or an eighty-year-old, maybe you can practice being kind.
One of the reasons “Good Bones” has had such traction is that it directly addresses our responsibility toward our children, the future generations. How do we prepare them for the dramas they will encounter both in their own lives and in the world? “How to keep the worst parts from them while they’re young, while not lying to them,” as Maggie Smith said in the Washington Post interview. Every parent is faced with this dilemma, especially now that children are exposed daily to tragedies and injustices around the world.
Jason Gardner, my editor, told me about his ten-year-old son, who anxiously asked him about climate change. “He’s heard enough about it that he finally asked if I thought all the ice at the North and South Poles would eventually melt. I said I didn’t know, but that it is melting, and lots of people are trying to do something about it. I tried to be hopeful, even though I don’t really feel hopeful myself. Because pessimism doesn’t do anything, and I certainly want to instill a fighting spirit in my children. Honestly, though, I don’t think anything I said made him feel any better. That was painful to realize.”
Maggie Smith uses a wry, matter-of-fact humor to keep our keel even in the stormy sea of her subject.
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.
Having prepared us with generalities, she ventures into deeper waters. She acknowledges without flinching the awful reality of specific truths:
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. [...]
for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you.
And why does she keep this from her children? Because she wants them to know and believe what she herself knows and believes: that this world is worth living for, in spite of everything.
Her final metaphor is a stroke of pure poetic inspiration that drives the point home in the most deceptively prosaic way. This earth is prime real estate. It’s got good bones. With a little imagination, it’s got all the makings of your own little slice of paradise. Yes, it’s a fixer-upper, it’s true. It needs a paint job and, yes, some significant remodeling here and there. It’s an old house, and there will always be repairs to do. But it’s got good bones. The foundations are sound. It could be beautiful. In the final line Smith speaks to her children and turns the work over to the next generation:
You could make this place beautiful.