The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

I’m almost certain, though I am certain of nothing. There is a solitude in this world I cannot pierce. I would die for it.

I have, before, been tricked into believing I could be both an I and the world. The great eye of the world is both gaze and gloss. To be swallowed by being seen. A dream. To be made whole by being not a witness, but witnessed.

I can do nothing. I take the soil in my clean fingers and to say I weep is untrue, weep is too musical a word. I heave into the soil. You cannot die. I just came to this life again, alive in my silent way. Last night I dreamt I could only save one person by saying their name and the exact time and date. I choose you.

But right now all I want is a story about human kindness,

We are talking about how we carry so many people with us wherever we go, how, even when simply living, these unearned moments are a tribute to the dead.

Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?

I am utterly suspicious of advice. What is the world like out there? Are you singing in the tunnels?

Endure time, this envenomed veil of extremes—loss and grief and reckoning.

I want to honor a man who wants to hold a wild thing, only for a second, long enough to admire it fully, and then wants to watch it safely return to its life, bends to be sure the grass closes up behind it.

I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Am I stronger or weaker than when the year began, a lie that joins two selves like a hinge.

I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

History comes at us through the sheen of time.

I kindle the image in my body all day, the mirror, the brush, the animals, the vast space of the imagination, the solid gaze of a woman who has witnessed me as unassailable, the clarity of her vision so clean I feel almost free.

He looms not large to me, but significant.

I have proof a nearly twiglike branch can still hold a too-heavy falcon. It is not much to go on, I know.

he knew not to risk it all for a stolen moment of exultation.

Who would have told you life was a series of warnings, but also magic.

everything felt wild and illicit

The true and serious beauty of trees,

and we tried to remember how it felt to receive and notice the receiving,

Not the form but the marrow of form.

Is it time that moves in me now? A sense of ache and unraveling,