Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

When I first started writing love poems, they terrified me. More than poems about politics, or rage, or trauma, or pain, the poems that talk about love or surrender to love felt, to say the least, risky. They felt risky because who among us hasn’t had love end. I’ve had love end and been roundly destroyed by it. Even when I was young and newly acquainted with the ways of the world, it seemed utterly impossible that love could end. And yet, it did.

Here was the question that troubled me. Where does love go when it ends? And of course the bigger question: How can you ever surrender to love again if you know that it can dissolve, break, burst into flames. So, when I finally did love again and surrendered to it, writing about it felt like jumping off the high dive. What if you wrote a love poem and then the love fell apart the next month? No one knows the future. No one can hold on to anything forever.

The way that I could finally lean into it, move through the idea of writing about love and desire, was to allow the poem to be what it is right then in the moment and stop catastrophizing about what could go wrong with it in the future. What I had to admit to myself was that if I was going to be hurt down the road, I was willing to be hurt to experience this moment of love, this moment of complete joy.

Now, tell me that’s not terrifying. It is! It’s so much easier to go through life protecting yourself from all possible harm. But to really praise and shout out desire, we have to write while knowing one potential future might be without that love. Maybe that is also what makes us wholly alive, the thrill of knowing the risk. The danger of love is built into every joyful moment. My god, I could lose you. My god, I could lose you, we are always saying.

And so, I maintain that love poems are some of the hardest poems, some of the riskiest poems, and when they succeed it feels like an ode not just to romantic love, but to the person who was willing to scratch those words in stone and not give a damn what comes next. To shout from the mountain and say, love exists, right now, right here, you and me in this moment forever.

In today’s sensual poem, we see both that desire and surrender to love, and we also see the risk, the danger. The speaker knows they may get hurt and still, they run headlong into that heat and I, for one, think it’s my favorite risk of all.

The Moth
by Francisco Márquez

		         after Tommye Blount

           beats itself
against the glass

and I have nothing
to offer it. Next

to the others who
like angels

don’t wreck
their wings,

or tear the wall
that is home

or their coffin. 
My pretty man

is the night
engulfing 

the image.
Moths breed

like bluebells
in his belly.

I come alive
inside you:

the real me
waiting, 

wanton, 
wanting

to be burned.

"The Moth" by Francisco Márquez. Used by permission of the poet.