Ada Limon

48 year old Poet Laureate Ada Limon is the first Latina Poet Laureate. NPR article 5/26/24.

A Name 

When Eve walked among

the animals and named them—

nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,

fiddler crab, fallow deer—

I wonder if she ever wanted

them to speak back, looked into

their wide wonderful eyes and

whispered, Name me, name me.

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear

the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,

the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,

that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw

that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s

left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned

orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can

you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek

bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into

your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to

say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish

comes back belly up, and the country plummets

into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still

something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.

But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing

like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move

my living limbs into the world without too much

pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight

toward the pickup trucks break-necking down

the road, because she thinks she loves them,

because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud

roaring things will love her back, her soft small self

alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,

until I yank the leash back to save her because

I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,

and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings

high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay

her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.

Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards

the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love

from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,

like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together

peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

The Burying Beetle

I like to imagine even the plants

want attention, so I weed for four

hours straight, assuring the tomatoes

feel July’s hot breath on the neck,

the Japanese maple can stretch,

the sweet potatoes, spider plants,

the Asiatic lilies can flourish in this

place we’ve dared to say we “own.”

Each nicked spindle of morning glory

or kudzu or purslane or yellow rocket

(Barbarea vulgaris, for Christ’s sake),

and I find myself missing everyone I know.

I don’t know why. First come the piles

of nutsedge and creeper and then an

ache that fills the skin like the Cercospora

blight that’s killing the blue skyrocket juniper

slowly from the inside out. Sure, I know

what it is to be lonely, but today’s special

is a physical need to be touched by someone

decent, a pulsing palm to the back. My man

is in South Africa still, and people just keep

dying even when I try to pretend they’re

not. The crown vetch and the curly dock

are almost eliminated as I survey the neatness

of my work. I don’t feel I deserve this time,

or the small plot of earth I get to mold into

someplace livable. I lost God awhile ago.

And I don’t want to pray, but I can picture

the plants deepening right now into the soil,

wanting to live, so I lie down among them,

in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered

in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt

that’s been turned and turned like a problem

in the mind.