The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

She is a funny creature and earnest, and she is doing what she can to survive.

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.

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

It is what we do in order to care for things, make them ourselves, our elders, our beloveds, our unborn. But perhaps that is a lazy kind of love. 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?

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?

Mistral writes: I killed a woman in me: one I did not love. But I do not want to kill that longing woman in me. I love her and I want her to go on longing until it drives her mad, that longing, until her desire is something like a blazing flower, a tree shaking off the torrents of rain as if it is simply making music.

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.

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

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper from a long line of weepers. I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.