Ben

“Years later, back from Mexico or South America, he’d admit he was tired of history, of always discovering the ruin by ruining it, wrecking a forest for a temple, a temple that should be simply left a temple. He wanted it all to stay as it was, even if it went undiscovered. I want to honor a man who wants to hold a wild thing, only for a second, long enough to admire it fully, and then wants to watch it safely return to its life, bends to be sure the grass closes up behind it.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I respect the patience of heartbreak how it waits through the sweetness through the familiar beauty & then reveals itself through what doesn’t return or never arrives at all & it is only you & a series of blinking memories the moments you had once & believed yourself able to touch again I think another word for this is hunger”
― Ada Limon, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

“To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. 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 that 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 Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems

“I want that. That kind of reeling in the wind. All the loose dry teeth, all the old bones of the skull, all the world, and the figure swaying with its stick to make untuned music even death cannot deny.”
― Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind: Poems