The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

To be swallowed by being seen. A dream. To be made whole by being not a witness, but witnessed.

Somewhere in the haunted desert I hitched my callow life to a man who thought I hadn’t suffered enough. He might have said that very thing, You haven’t suffered enough.

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 loved fireworks so much they made me weep without warning. I smoked too much pot one young summer and almost missed them until I simply remembered to look up. Gold valley crackling in chaos. Now, it is a sound that undoes me, too much violence to the sky. In this way, I have become more dog. More senses, shake, and nerve.

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

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. I feel it moving through me, that snake, his horse Midge sturdy and nothing special, traveling the canyons and the tumbleweeds hunting for rabbits before the war. My grandmother picking peaches. Stealing the fruit from the orchards as she walked home. No one said it was my job to remember.