Good Bones -- 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.

 

---

Maggie Smith, "Good Bones" from Waxwing magazine (Issue IX, Summer 2016) (2016)

https://maggiesmithpoet.com/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/1639193/january-february-2025

To the young who want to die -- Gwendolyn Brooks

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The tall gall in the small seductive vial

will wait will wait:

will wait a week: will wait through April.

You do not have to die this certain day.

Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.

I assure you death will wait. Death has

a lot of time. Death can

attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is

just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;

can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.

Stay here — through pout or pain or peskyness.

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

--

Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917–December 3, 2000) 

“To the Young Who Want to Die,” which appeared in her 1987 collection The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (public library), dedicated to the students of the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School, published by the imprint she had founded and named after her father, the janitor of a music company.

The Uses of Sorrow -- Mary Oliver

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

---

Source: The Uses of Sorrow” by Mary Oliver, from Thirst, 2007. Beacon Press.

Poem -- Langston Hughes (1901 –1967)

(To F. S.)

I loved my friend. 

He went away from me. 

There’s nothing more to say. 

The poem ends, 

Soft as it began,—

I loved my friend. 

---

Source:  The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) by Langston Hughes. This poem is in the public domain.

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade -- Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.


--- 
Source: Everyone at This Party Has Two Names by Brad Aaron Modlin. Copyright © 2016 by Brad Aaron Modlin. Originally published by Southeast Missouri State University Press.

This poem was originally read in the Poetry Unbound episode “A Poem for What You Learn Alone.”

Hear this poem:
https://onbeing.org/programs/brad-aaron-modlin-what-you-missed-that-day-you-were-absent-from-fourth-grade/