Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s Stunning Love Poem to Life – The Marginalian

We all know that the atoms composing our our bodies and our brains can be traced back to particular stars that died way back in some faraway nook of the cosmos. We all know what will happen to our own atoms when we ourselves die. Nonetheless, one thing in us quivers with incomprehension on the notion that each single considered one of our capacities — love and arithmetic, the bomb and the Benedictus — is the churn of discarded stardust. And but it’s exactly this proven fact that renders us miraculous — creatures of matter, able to seeing magnificence, able to making which means. That is our inheritance. That is the intense star of resurrection lighting up our beautiful aliveness.

U.S Poet Laureate Ada Limón channels this cosmic future of ours in her splendid poem “Lifeless Stars,” present in her assortment The Carrying (public library) and skim right here by the poet herself throughout her altogether great lecture at Portland’s Literary Arts, to which I’ve added the requisite benediction of Bach.

DEAD STARS
by Ada Limón

Out right here, there’s a bowing even the bushes are doing.
            Winter’s icy hand behind all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a sort of stillness that feels
so mute it’s nearly in one other 12 months.

I’m a fireplace of spiders nowadays: a nest of making an attempt.

We level out the celebrities that make Orion as we take out
      the trash, the rolling containers a music of suburban thunder.

It’s nearly romantic as we alter the waxy blue
      recycling bin till you say, Man, we must always actually study
some new constellations.

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

However largely we’re forgetting we’re useless stars too, my mouth is full
      of mud and I want to reclaim the rising —

to lean within the highlight of streetlight with you, towards
      what’s bigger inside us, towards how we had been born.

Look, we’re not unspectacular issues.
      We’ve come this far, survived this a lot. What

would occur if we determined to outlive extra? To like tougher?

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

Stood for the numerous mute mouths of the ocean, of the land?

What would occur if we used our our bodies to cut price

for the protection of others, for earth,
      if we declared a clear evening, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our calls for into the sky, made ourselves so massive
folks may level to us with the arrows they make of their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, in any case of that is over?

Complement with the unusual astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s “Antidotes to Fear of Death” and “Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter),” then revisit the poetic physicist Brian Greene’s Rilke-lensed reflection on how our creaturely limitations give life meaning.