My favorite Ada Limón poems!

Hello, hello~ Today’s newsletter is only going to be some of my favorite poems from Ada Limón! I hope you’ll enjoy them :)

1.

Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time,

- from “The Leash,” The Carrying.

2.

excerpt from The Great Blue Heron of Dunbar Road:

I’m thinking of the way my stepdad got sober, how he never told us, just stopped drinking and sat for a long time in the low folding chair on the Bermuda grass reading and sometimes soaking up the sun like he was the story’s only subject. When he drove me to school, we decided it would be a good day, if we saw the blue heron in the algae-covered pond next to the road, so that if we didn’t see it, I’d be upset. Then, he began to lie. To tell me he’d seen it when he hadn’t, or to suppose that it had just taken off when we rounded the corner in the gray car that somehow still ran, and I would lie, too, for him. I’d say I saw it. Heard the whoosh of wings over us. That’s the real truth. What we told each other to help us through the day: the great blue heron was there, even when the pond dried up, or froze over; it was there because it had to be. Just now, I felt like I wanted to be alone for a long time, in a folding chair on the lawn with all my private agonies, but then I saw you and the way you’re hunching over your work like a puzzle, and I think even if I fail at everything, I still want to point out the heron like I was taught, still want to slow the car down to see the thing that makes it all better, the invisible gift, what we see when we stare long enough into nothing.

3.

The Raincoat:

When the doctor suggested surgery and a brace for all my youngest years, my parents scrambled to take me to massage therapy, deep tissue work, osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine unspooled a bit, I could breathe again, and move more in a body unclouded by pain. My mom would tell me to sing songs to her the whole forty-five minute drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty- five minutes back from physical therapy. She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang, because I thought she liked it. I never asked her what she gave up to drive me, or how her day was before this chore. Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet another spine appointment, singing along to some maudlin but solid song on the radio, and I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.

4.

The Carrying:

5.

Dead Stars:

6. Lashed to the Helm, All Stiff and Stark,” Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015)

Let me start here: I am as cold as I have ever been. Two days ago, a week? A mythic wreck came — such was the wreck of the two of us. I’m such an ignorant boat — a lost sea-tossed daughter pierced by time’s spiked icicles, begging for the original mouth’s thawing water. Isn’t it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief. If we could light up the room with pain, we’d be such a glorious fire.

7. The Other Wish:

I used to think it was like a light bulb, life, dangling in the chest, asking to be switched on.

But it’s not the light that’s ever in question, rather, what’s your brilliant, glaring wattage?

What do you dare to gleam out and reflect? If I were to fall (sabotaged wax, torn pinion),

I’d want to fall from the terrifying height of her, the dust of my years crazy and flashing

lit up by the victory of my disastrous flight.

8. Instructions on Not Giving Up:

9. Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds:

10. “State Bird,” Bright Dead Things:

But love, I’ll concede this: whatever state you are, I’ll be that state’s bird, the loud, obvious blur of song people point to when they wonder where it is you’ve gone.

With love,

Amulya.