The Gift of Poetry In Challenging Times

[image description: a page of a book with a dried flower on top.]

The other day when I wrote about how I never get any reading done when I’ve got the election night blues, I wasn’t thinking about how my usual election night blues would be lasting all week. My focus has been minimal at best. I’ve been obsessively checking the New York Times and Washington Post electoral map for days. I’ve gotten no reading done.

Except for one thing: poetry. When my attention is shot, especially to the level it currently is, the only thing that keeps my attention is poetry. Not the overly puzzling, cryptic kind––the straight-talking, poetry of the people kind.

I’ve found myself returning over and over again to “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith. I first read it years ago and thought it was beautiful, but didn’t give it much thought beyond that. Since 2016 when the poem was published, I’ve found myself recalling bits and pieces of it in times of stress and strife. I’ve read it once a year until this week when I’ve read it probably two dozen times. I’ve memorized it and the process of memorization, that repetitive, ritualistic act has brought me comfort in a way that fiction and nonfiction haven’t been able to.

I want to believe the world and this country are places with good bones and that we are capable of making it beautiful. I want to have hope despite and in spite of evidence to the contrary because the alternative might break me. I want to be a realtor of the world, always looking for those good bones: the potential amid the wreckage.

If you’d asked me for my favorite poem before, I might have told you “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay or “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton or “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath or “In the Gloaming, In the Roiling Night” by Ruth Awad. I love them all and a dozen more and my answer would’ve changed depending on the day. The theme connecting each of them is hope. Change is hard-won but worth it.

“Good Bones” has brought me such comfort over the past few days that I bought a signed broadside of the poem to hang in my house, where I hope the effect on me will be long-lasting.

What poem brings you comfort when you need it? Tell me so I can read it!