Beautiful but inaccurate

Poet Maggie Smith has written a poem entitled “Good Bones” that I both love and despise.

I love it because it’s a brilliant idea that I think is shared by the majority of human beings walking this planet. She has applied craft to an insight that’s real, filled with truth and vulnerability, and shines a light on a dark corner of the mind.

But I also don’t agree with a single word of it.

I don’t think it represents my truth, and honestly, I don’t think it represents an essential truth. I think Smith has captured a misguided belief held by many (and maybe most) that I push back on almost daily.

So I struggle with the poem. It’s brilliant in the way it captures the human condition so artfully and beautifully, but I don’t think any of it’s true, even though I think she and most people think it probably is.

Good Bones
by Maggie Smith

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.
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