Beautiful piece.

What makes this powerful is the honesty of the contradiction. “Life is short, though I keep this from my children” carries love, fear, and protection all at once. Then the poem keeps widening, from “a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways” to “for every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird”, and it never lets go of that tension between what the speaker knows and what the speaker still wants to hand down.

And that last turn is brilliant. “I am trying / to sell them the world” followed by the “good bones” image is such a sharp, human way to describe hope. Not innocence. Not denial. Just the stubborn act of saying: yes, it’s damaged, and yes, I still want my children to believe something beautiful can be made here. That’s a hard kind of love, and the poem understands it.