You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

Watching them makes me feel at once more human and less human. I become aware that I am in a body, yes, but it is a body connected to these trees, and we are breathing together.

You might not know this, but poems are like trees in this way. They let us breathe together. In each line break, caesura, and stanza, there’s a place for us to breathe.

Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone.

If in order to have one tree flourish, we must plant more around it, the same must go for poems.

Nature cannot be redeemed. It is your wish to redeem it, to set things right. It is the impossibility of redemption. It is the lover walking out, their self-justified gait as they disappear through the tunnel of flowers.

In the forest, grief lives a new life as devotion. Early August leaves play at color before surrendering to both man-made ground and messy slopes

I wonder what’s past resistance to change, on the other side of fear. If I don’t look down, or walk away. Step over the snake instead, realize both living and dying require giving up.

my relationship with (love) (nature) (money) (fill in the blank) is like my relationship to weather— i only see it when it’s pouring on my head. i’m sorry to the trees i grew up with.

Love and dread are brethren said a mystic woman in the Middle Ages.

People who romanticize an Africa They’ve never seen Like to identify themselves With lions. It’s all roar and hunt, Quick fucks and blond manes.

Some people call a hackberry a junk tree or trash tree, throwing shade. I love the tree’s shade, and now it will be gone, as well as the sunlight in the shape of love, and the evil spirits will do as they please with our nights.

My grandfather there and muscadines in the Georgia heat. My grandfather smoked Winstons and what could be more American than choosing one’s future decline.

Do I also prefer outrage to action? Is it as simple as anger being easier than grief? And oh my God, are you as exhausted as I am from grieving the planet? Tell me what I’m supposed to say about the end of the world.

these mountains have given us so much & we will not even give ourselves to each other