The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

I was nothing to that bird, which wasn’t concerned with history’s bloody battles or why this creek was called Drowning Creek, a name I love though it gives me shivers, because it sounds like an order, a place where one goes to drown.

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?

And so 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.

trees. 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.