It was June 12, 2016 when a 29 years old gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in a mass shooting at the Pulse, which was said to be a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, USA.

It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the US since the September 11 attacks.

The gunman was an American born Muslim, whose parents were Afghans. Mateen swore allegiance to the leader of the ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and he told FBI that shooting was in response to the American-led interventions in Iraq and in Syria.

Three days after Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones,” was published in Waxwing. A reader moved by the poem’s message posted a screenshot on Facebook, where a musician named Shira Erlichman read it and passed it along on Twitter. As the poem traveled across the Web, its celebrity endorsements got bigger. 

The poem seizes the mood in the tumultuous year that was 2016. 

here is the complete poem – 

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,
 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.

Why we don’t have poets now like Maggie Smith when everyday children are killed in Gaza?

It is sad to see no condemnation from world’ intellectual circle.

(Top photo courtesy CNN)

(Poem courtesy Waxwing, with thanks)