Good Bones Goes Viral Maggie Smith, MFA 2003, and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English in spring 2016, wrote a poem, “Good Bones,” that spread like wildfire on the Internet just after the Orlando Nightclub shooting in June. The poem was published three days after the massacre and a day before British politician Jo Cox was assassinated in northern England. In the midst of all this tragedy, Smith’s poem touched the hearts of many worldwide.
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,
The poem focuses on how Smith wants to hide some of the world’s tragedies from her children. “I am trying to sell them the world,” she writes in “Good Bones.” The poem first appeared in Waxwing magazine and was later poem-of-theday on the Poetry Foundation website. Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry, Weep Up (Tupelo Press, forthcoming 2018); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015); and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005); as well as three prizewinning chapbooks. She is a freelance writer and editor, and serves as a consulting editor to the Kenyon Review. In 2016, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year.
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.
– Maggie Smith
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DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH