The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

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?

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.

this was about putting a bunch of scorpions in a jar

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

Mercy is not frozen in time, but flits about frantically, unsure where to land.

Why do we quickly dismiss our ancient ones? Before our phones stole the light of our faces, shiny and blue in the televised night, they worked farms and butchered and trapped animals and swept houses and returned to each other after long hours and told stories.

But haven’t we learned by now that just because something is bound to break doesn’t mean we shouldn’t shiver when it breaks?