The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

To be made whole by being not a witness, but witnessed.

Why can’t I just love the flower for being a flower?

Between the ground and the feast is where I live now.

because nothing is ordinary now even when it is ordinary.

What is it to be seen in the right way? As who you are? A flash of color, a blur in the crowd, something spectacular but untouchable.

It makes me want to give all my loves the adjectives they deserve: You are Resplendent. You are Radiant. You are Sublime.

We did what children do with tiny and terrible things, we trapped them so we could see more closely, intimately, investigate their particular evildoing, behind the thick clear glass of the mason jar.

We never ate the bottom-feeder, buried by the rosebush where my ancestors swore the roses bloomed twice as big that year, the year I killed a thing because I was told to, the year I met my twin and buried him without weeping so I could be called brave.

And so I have two brains now. Two entirely different brains. The one that always misses where I’m not, and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.

you’re all fauna and no flora.

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.

Now, it is a sound that undoes me, too much violence to the sky. In this way, I have become more dog. More senses, shake, and nerve.

Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.

Now the tree is gone. The men are gone, just a ground-down stump where what felt like wisdom once was.

oh lover, what a word, what a world, this gray waiting.

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers.

If I’m honest, a foal pulled chest-level close in the spring heat, his every-which-way coat reverberating in the wind, feels akin to what I imagine atonement might feel like, or total absolution.