The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

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?

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.

When I looked it up, I learned it was the Magnificent Frigatebird. It sounded like that enormity of a bird had named itself. What a pleasure to say, I am Magnificent. And, too, they traveled as a team, so I wondered if they named each other. Generously tapping one another’s deeply forked tail or their plumage, glistening with salt air, their gular sacs saying, You are Magnificent. You are also Magnificent.

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. We watched how they crawled, stingers readied, on top of one another, circling. Our discovery felt awful, like unearthing mortality.

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.

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