poet Ada Limon

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limón

Posted on by alisonmcghee

A few months ago I was tromping around the Zurich airport train station, backpack heavy on my shoulders, following signs, twisting and turning down this hallway and that. Now to figure out the ticket kiosk. Now to find the right platform. Now to double check the time. Tired. Hungry. Thirsty. Worried worried worried and so sad about my country.

Ticket in hand, I turned a corner and locked eyes with a small brown dog who looked at me calmly, as if she’d been waiting for me. I dropped to my knees next to her and held out the back of my hand and she lay her head on it. The animal part of me wanted to live with this dog forever, and I looked up at her human, who smiled in understanding. The world was calm for a moment.

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart, by Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still here it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

Click here for more information about Ada Limón. Today’s poem is from The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas. 

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limón

Posted on by alisonmcghee

In fifth grade a boy in my class reached out and twisted my nearly non-existent breast while all us kids were standing on the steps after recess. The physical pain was so shocking I couldn’t breathe. Terrified that anyone might see me cry, might see how shaken I was, I stood there like a statue.

That moment felt like an end to freedom. It still does. This must be why I cried at the opening scenes of that first Wonder Woman movie. All those wild, fearless women warriors. How I’d love to go back in time, to those steps outside our elementary school. Things would end differently.

How to Triumph Like a Girl, by Ada Limón

I like the lady horses best,
how they make it all look easy,
like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.
I like their lady horse swagger,
after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!
But mainly, let’s be honest, I like
that they’re ladies. As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.

Click here for more information about Ada Limón. Today’s poem is from her collection Bright Dead Things, published in 2015 by Milkweed Editions.


alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Ada Limón

Posted on by alisonmcghee

When I was a little kid I loved the book The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, to the extent that I memorized my favorite lines: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. Then I grew up and had children, and then my children grew up, and sometimes it feels so befuddling, like wait, stop, come back, how did this all happen so fast?

This is when I instinctively and silently recite one of my mantras – They’re people in the world before they’re your children, Alison – a line that came to me years ago and which I never fully understood until three days ago, when I read this poem by the wondrous Ada Limón.

What I Didn’t Know Before, by Ada Limón

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but a four-legged
beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after
the mother. A horse gives way to another
horse and then suddenly there are two horses,
just like that. That’s how I loved you. You, 
off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

For more information about Ada Limón, whose poems are beloved to me, please visit her website.

alisonmcghee.com

Words by Winter: my podcast