Quotes from Ada Limón

How masterful and mad is hope.

We all tip our lonely hats in one un-lonely sound.

All the world is moving, even sand from one shore to another is being shuttled. I live my life half afraid, and half shouting at the trains when they thunder by. This letter to you is both.

If I'd a handmade, fanned out, feathered set, me? I'd choose the moon, always the sister moon.

How good it is to love live things, even when what they've done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into our own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.

People love to make big pronouncements about poetry saving us. And I want to believe that, but for now, what I can say is … poetry can make us feel. And right now, maybe that's enough. It doesn't have to bring us hope or joy, it just has to remind us that we feel. That we are alive, and here, and feeling the world.

Fireworks in the background like an incongruous soundtrack, either celebratory or ominous, a veil of smoke behind a neighbor's house, the air askew with booms.

Sometimes, there seems to be a halfway point between where you've been and everywhere else, and we were there.

It means, if you're alone, when love is all around, We all tip our lonely hats in one un-lonely sound.

I ask T to tell me what to write about, she says, Saturation, and I think of that feeling when you're really full, or life is full and you can't think of anything else that could fit in it, but then even more sky comes and more days and there is so much to remember and swallow.

The great black scavenger flies parallel now, each of us speeding, intently and driven, toward what we've been taught to do with death.

The day before me undresses in the wet southern heat

this day's singular existence in time, the native field flourishing selfishly, only for itself.

It means, if you're alone, when love is all around, We all tip our lonely hates in one un-lonely sound.

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 flowers for being a flower? How many flowers have I yanked to puppet as if it was easy for the world to make flowers?

Does poetry have its issues? One hundred percent. Does poetry have its limitations? One hundred percent. It's not going to cure disease or feed the hungry, but it might help us to understand someone else's experience just a little bit better. Or maybe it'll make us mad and then we'll have to interrogate why we're mad, or implicated, or why we feel left out. Like many of the arts, poetry can be the way of recognizing our own beauty and our own flaws.

Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too.

There should be a better way to offer something, anything, to people who need it. And yet no transaction is uncomplicated, no relationship is without a power dynamic, and "help" isn't always what we think it is.

It's been a long time since I wanted to die, it makes me feel like taking off my skin suit and seeing how my light flies all on its own, neon and bouncy like a wannabe star.

put on the white dress that you had once said made you look like an angel with its real swan feathers and fools gold. Then I sat for a long time in the night and waited. At dawn, I woke with feathers sticky on my tongue and I remembered you were dead all over again.

What I know now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each morning and recognise my own flesh, for this one thing she made—me—to remain how she intended, for one of us to make it out unscathed

I trust him. He leans in, tells me the real miracle, more than marriage, the thing that makes you believe there might be a god after all, is the making of a child. He stares at me, but I am not there anymore. I don't say we've tried a long time, been sad, been happy, that perhaps the only thing I can make is love and art. I want to tell him that's enough. Isn't it?

HOW MOST OF THE DREAMS GO First, it's a fawn dog, and then it's a baby. I'm helping him to swim in a thermal pool, the water is black as coffee, the cement edges are steep so to sink would be easy and final. I ask the dog (that is also the child), Is it okay that I want you to be my best friend? And the child nods. (And the dog nods.) Sometimes, he drowns. Sometimes, we drown together.

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, pink, pink, pink, pink, pink.