The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

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.

The true and serious beauty of trees, how it seemed insane that they should offer this to us, how unworthy we were, bewildered, how soon we were nearly weeping at their trunks as they tossed down petal after petal, and we tried to remember how it felt to receive and notice the receiving, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink.