Bag of Bones

The poem is set in a mass graveyard. This graveyard functions as the poem’s dominant symbol of death and violence, as the scattered skulls and bones in this graveyard belong to the victims of a dictator’s attacks against his own people. The unnamed woman’s quest to retrieve her loved one’s remains encapsulates in microcosm the link between the individual tragedy she grieves and the collective tragedy the country has experienced. In choosing to set her poem in a mass grave site, the poet makes explicit the sheer scale of the crimes she is writing about: countless deaths and a society in ruins.

“Bag of Bones” opens and closes with a cruel irony. The opening line of the poem—“What good luck!” (Line 1)—creates a jarring effect when the speaker reveals what this “luck” actually entails: “she has found his bones” (Line 2). Finding a loved one’s remains is not something usually associated with “luck” or a good outcome, but the sad irony of this poem is built upon the fact that this unnamed woman is lucky: She has managed to experience the only form of closure available to her, and can now treat her loved one’s remains with the dignity and respect he deserves. At the poem’s end the speaker goes full circle, returning to the graveyard to close with the image of the unnamed woman’s “disappointed neighbor / who had not yet found her own [bones]” (Lines 46-47). Under these terrible circumstances, finding the remains of your murdered loved one has become a stroke of good fortune.

There are two main contrasts in the poem: individuality and anonymity, and life and death. The anonymity is created through the imagery of the mass grave site and the “thousands of bones” (Line 7) that fill it, alluding to the dictator’s crimes. The individuality is embodied in the skull that the unnamed woman recognizes and retrieves as that of her loved one: In recognizing his skull, and in remembering who he was, the unnamed woman recreates a sense of individuality in the face of collective suffering.

Life is glimpsed in the imagery associated with the victim’s lost face and life. The unnamed woman remembers his eyes, his nose, and his mouth, as well as his love for music that reminds him of “his own story” (Line 12), and the kisses he gave her. The woman’s act of remembrance in the middle of the mass grave site thus creates a powerful contrast between the death that surrounds her, and the belief in the worth of each individual life that she continues to cling to.