The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

To be swallowed by being seen. A dream. To be made whole by being not a witness, but witnessed.

Sure, sure, it’s so obvious, that’s who to root for, the thing almost dead that is, in fact, not dead at all.

he wants to teach me something, to get me where it hurts.

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

No one wants to be a pretty thing all the time. But no one wants to be the weed.

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.

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.

What else did I expect? What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.