The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

Why can’t I just love the flower for being a flower? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

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

A month before you died you wrote a letter to old friends saying you swam with a pod of dolphins in open water, saying goodbye, but what you told me most about was the eye. That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish that passed you during that last-ditch defiant swim. On the shore, you described the fish as nothing you’d seen before, a blue-gray behemoth moving slowly and enduringly through its deep fathomless North Pacific waters. That night, I heard more about that fish and that eye than anything else.

What a jewel of a miny story

I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves. Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?