Good bones

I'm staying up late tonight, prepping for a procedure tomorrow morning. Those of you middle-agers know what I'm talking about. While I drink lots of fluids, I'm catching up on some TV, like one of my favorite shows, Madam Secretary. If you've never seen it, I highly recommend it! Tea Leoni and Tim Daly, a real-life couple, are the sexiest married 50+ couple on television.

The last episode was serious, addressing slut shaming and male complicity as well as human trafficking. After the secretary's team had a failed mission resulting in trafficked girls dying during a rescue attempt, combined with budget cuts to humanitarian efforts combined with increased defense spending (sound familiar?) one of Secretary McCoy's staff read an excerpt of this poem, "Good Bones" by Maggie Smith, who wrote it last year after the Pulse shooting.

PRI's the World named it as the official poem of 2016. I love it, and I find it perfect for this time in our world. I hope you like it too.

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.

Smith told The Washington Post, “I’m happy for the poem but not the circumstances of its popularity,” she says. “I wish I had written a poem that people share when babies are born or people get married.”

But she doesn't believe the poem is pessimistic. “I don’t think I could write a poem that the world is beyond repair,” she says. Even if the world may seem at times like a dilapidated house that only a fool would buy, it still “has good bones,” Smith says. “My hope is that the poem is a call to improve it anyway.”

My prayer is that our good bones sustain us and keep us strong through the hurricane to come.