The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

Why am I not allowed delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth, as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled spikes used in warfare and fencing.

I wanted to stop, stop the car to take a closer look at the solitary, stocky water bird with its blue crown and its blue chest and its uncommonness. But already we were a blur and miles beyond the flying fisher by the time I had realized what I’d witnessed.

People were nothing to that bird, hovering over the creek. I was nothing to that bird, which wasn’t concerned with history’s bloody battles or why this creek was called Drowning Creek,

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.

wait for a breaking, a breaking open, a breaking out. I have, before, been tricked into believing I could be both an I and the world.