The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

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?

my beloved and I are lying in bed in a soft silence. 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.

Of course, more yellow. And so now in my head, when I see that yellow tangle, I say, For Cynthia, for Cynthia, forsythia, forsythia, more yellow.

They are kissing so tenderly it feels rude to watch,

When did kissing become so dangerous? Or was it always so?

how did you do it? Such bravery, such softness, even with all that name-calling and rage.

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.

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.

Today is a haunting.

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.

I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness.

What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.

Violence is done and history records it. Gold ruins us. Men ruin us.

History comes at us through the sheen of time.

But who are you to kill your own bloodline?

Now teach me poetry.

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

You can’t sum it up. A life.

No one said it was my job to remember. I took no notes, though I’ve stared too long.

Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?

And aren’t we all alone in the end?

What is it to be wholly loved like this?