gabrielle

“What if, instead of carrying

a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“Will you tell us the stories that make
us uncomfortable, but not complicit?”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself.”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying

“can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks breaknecking 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 bodies toward 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.”
― Ada Limon, The Carrying: Poems