The Hurting Kind: Poems

by Ada Limon

She is a funny creature and earnest, and she is doing what she can to survive.

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. The bird doesn’t call the creek that name. The bird doesn’t call it anything.

have, before, been tricked into believing I could be both an I and the world. The great eye of the world is both gaze and gloss. 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? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

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.

Two female horses, retired mares, separated by a sliding barn door, nose each other. Neither of them will get pregnant again, their job is to just be a horse. Sometimes, though, they cling to one another, find a friend and will whine all night for the friend to be released. Through the gate, the noses touch, and you can almost hear— Are you okay? Are you okay?

Distracted by the evidence of life at our feet, we had no time for the waiting that was required. To watch the waves until the whales surfaced seemed a maddening task. Now, I am in the inland air that smells of smoke and gasoline, the trees blown leafless by wind. Could you refuse me if I asked you to point again at the horizon, to tell me something was worth waiting for?