I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.
Ada Limón, The Hurting Kind
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
Ada Limón, Hooky
What good is accuracy amidst the perpetual scattering that unspools the world.
Ada Limón, It’s The Season I Often Mistake
How much more drama can one body take? I wake up in the morning and relinquish my dreams. I go to bed with my beloved. I am delirious with my tenderness. Once, I was brave, but I have grown so weary of danger. I am soundlessness amid the constant sounds of war.
Ada Limón, “I Have Wanted Clarity in Light of My Lack of Light”
And I began to learn the names of trees. 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 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.
Ada Limón, Calling Things What They Are
Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he'd admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it,
Ada Limón, Cyrus & The Snakes
And of course there was music, though it was me and my incessant remembering.
Ada Limón, Banished Wonders
I want them to go on kissing, without fear. I want to watch them and not feel so abandoned by hands. Come home. Everything is begging you.
Ada Limón, It Begins With The Trees
I take the soil in
my clean fingers and to say
I weep is untrue, weep is too
musical a word. I heave
into the soil. You cannot die.
I just came to this life
again, alive in my silent way.
- Ada Limón, Invasive
There is a solitude in this world
I cannot pierce. I would die for it.
- Ada Limón, Drowning Creek