Ada Limón

SALVAGE

On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash and at her root is what
looks like a cavity hollowed out by flame.
On the other side, silvery green broadleaf
shoots ascend toward the winter light
and her bark is a cross between a bay
horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety
like the animal’s neck she resembles. Staring
at the tree for a long time now, I am reminded
of the righteousness I had before the scorch
of time. I miss who I was. I miss who we all were,
before we were this: half alive to the brightening sky,
half dead already. I place my hand on the unscarred
bark that is cool and unsullied, and because I cannot
apologize to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

© 2022, Ada Limón
From: The Hurting Kind
Publisher: Milkweed Editions,

Biography

‘I am human, enough I am alone, and I am desperate,  
enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high  
water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease,  
I am asking you to touch me.’   

Ada Limón is the 24th – and current – poet laureate of the United States. She is also the first Latinx woman to hold this position. Her mission as Poet Laureate is to find humanity back in the country she lives in through poetry. In the poet’s words, “Poetry is elemental, necessary and extraordinarily human. You feel this when you read poems by Limón: no matter what she describes, the warmth and power behind the words are always palpable. The poet now has six collections of poetry to her name. One of her collections, The Carrying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. She recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work. Recently, Limón was in the news for partnering with the U.S. space agency NASA: one of her poems will be engraved on the side of a rocket and launched into space. She is an extraordinary writer, but also a gifted speaker. If you want to experience that before she comes to Rotterdam, listen to her reviewer-acclaimed podcast The Slowdown, in which she advocates for a calmer way of life.