Moving the Bones – Reviewed
There are too many ancestors, so we are gathering their bones.
The poor ones, their graves broken by the roots of trees. The ones whose headstones have been weathered as blank as snow-drifts.
We have bought the wide plot. We have built the mausoleum. And now we fill it with the bones.
The ones killed in the monsoon floods. The one buried in her wedding dress. The one buried with his medals.
Because there will be a time when we cannot keep track of them, scattered in the cemetery like prodigals, we collect the bones.
The ones whose faces I can still recall. The ones who have been dead for a hundred years. We collect their bones.
At each opened grave, we think about the body taking its shape as father, sister, cousin, uncle. We hunger for the story of each figure.
…
You may find the rest of the poem here.
© Copyright © 2021 by Rick Barot. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 10, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
This poem is a part of a collection Moving the Bones, and can be found on Goodreads here, with this review posted here.
Analysis
Rick Barot’s poem Moving the Bones is a meditation on memory, family, and the passage of time. The work moves through a landscape of personal and collective history, where the past is not merely recalled but gathered, handled, and reconfigured, much like the bones that the speaker gathers from their ancestors. The theme is one of connection—connection to those who came before, to the bodies left behind, and to the histories that shape us. But it is also a poem about loss: the gradual disappearance of those histories, the inevitability of forgetting, and the shifting nature of home and identity.
The poem’s structure is loose, with a series of observations and reflections building on each other, almost in a chain of thought. The speaker moves through different sites of memory, both personal and communal, allowing the poem to take on a kind of sprawling, episodic quality. The lines are long, winding, and contemplative, creating a sense of a mind wandering through the past, collecting fragments and images. This structure, which mirrors the act of gathering bones, suggests an accumulation of memory over time—small, seemingly insignificant pieces coming together to form a larger, more complex whole. There’s a deliberate repetitiveness to the language, especially with the phrase “We hold the bones,” which serves as both a refrain and a meditation on the act of holding onto the past, even when that past feels like it’s slipping away.
The tone of the poem is one of quiet reverence but also of unease. The speaker acknowledges the difficulty of remembering and the paradox of memory itself—how it is both an act of preservation and an act of erasure. The imagery of bones—fragile, enduring, disjointed—captures this tension beautifully. At times, the poem feels like an elegy, a mourning for what has been lost, but there is also a kind of tenderness in the way the speaker interacts with the bones, as though they are not just relics of the dead but also conduits to understanding. In this way, Barot captures both the sorrow and the beauty of life’s impermanence. There’s something humbling in the act of gathering the bones, as if the speaker is trying to make sense of the chaos of history by offering it a shape.
There is also a strong undercurrent of displacement throughout the poem. The speaker contemplates what it means to come from a place or a family, to have roots in a particular soil. Yet, as the poem moves on, home becomes increasingly difficult to define. “Look back far enough and your family becomes unfamiliar,” Barot writes, and the speaker begins to see home as a shifting concept—something not tied to one place or nation but to the relationships and memories that define us. This tension between belonging and alienation runs deep throughout Moving the Bones, where identity itself is in flux, always being redefined by memory, migration, and time.
At its core, Moving the Bones is about the act of remembering and the ways in which we try to preserve what is fading. The act of collecting bones, of gathering history, is both an attempt at connection and an acknowledgment of how much is beyond our reach. The bones are symbols of the past, of stories that have already begun to slip away, even as we hold on to them. The poem’s resolution is not one of closure but of acceptance: there will always be things we cannot remember, and yet we continue to gather the fragments, to tell the stories, to make sense of the bones.
Barot’s language is not ornate but measured and precise, capturing the stillness of the act of remembering. There is a tenderness in his observations, even when the images are stark or unsettling. The image of the mausoleum, “white as certain roses,” is a beautiful example of Barot’s ability to weave the natural world into his reflections on death and memory. These moments of beauty and clarity punctuate the poem, offering brief reprieves from the darker themes of loss and dislocation.
In its quiet complexity, Moving the Bones invites the reader to consider their own relationship to the past—the people and places that shaped them, the memories that linger, and those that fade. The poem offers no easy answers but instead allows us to sit with the questions, to hold the bones, and to wonder at the mystery of what has been and what will be.
Photo by Angeline Winter on Unsplash
