National Poetry Month: Ada Limón

To celebrate National Poetry Month, several of us are sharing poetry with you on Thursdays in April. Today we're all sharing different poems from the same poet, Ada Limón. 

If her name sounds familiar it might be because she is the current Poet Laureate of the United States, or maybe it's because she was the host of the poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Maybe you've read one or more of her six books of poetry. She's won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and has been nominated for the National Book Award. She is a contemporary poet who writes in a personal and sometimes even conversational style about life, in a way that is accessible to almost everyone. 

The poem I chose today is one of my favorites because Ada Limón writes about a mundane task that we've all done (taking out the trash) in combination with vast and philosophical issues, and asks some big questions. 

Dead Stars
by Ada Limón

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
                 Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
       the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
       recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
       Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
       of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
       what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

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Limón, Ada. "Dead Stars". The Carrying, Milkweed Editions, 2018.

You can read more about the poet here or here. 

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Be sure to check in with Kym, Kat, and Sarah for more hopeful poetry today, and join us next Thursday for more poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. (And remember that any time is good for poetry, not just Thursdays in April!)