The Carrying: Poems
Ada Limon
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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, instead of carrying a child, I am supposed to carry grief?”
“I know you don’t always understand, but let me point to the first wet drops landing on the stones, the noise like fingers drumming the skin. I can’t help it. I will never get over making everything such a big deal.”
“All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe being kinder to others, to myself.”
“I saw a mom take her raincoat off and give it to her young daughter when a storm took over the afternoon. My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet”
“Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?”
“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.”
“More than the fuchsia fennels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I'll take it, the trees seem to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.”
“Even now, I don’t know much about happiness. I still worry and want an endless stream of more, but some days I can see the point in growing something, even if it’s just to say I cared enough.”
“crossed-legged with my friend named Echo who taught me how to amplify the strange sound the frogs made by cupping my ears. I need to hold this close within me, when today’s news is full of dead children, their faces opening their mouths for air that will not come. Once I was a child too and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour, eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping and uncapping our ears to hear the song the tenderest animals made.”
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Book Keywords:
motherhood, poems, the-carrying, importance, significance, poetry, observation
