Poetry Sunday: Calling Things What They Are by Ada Limon

It is important to call things what they are. The poet Ada Limon agrees.

Calling Things What They Are

by Ada Limon

I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.

Poetry Sunday: The Magnificent Frigatebird by Ada Limon

On trips to the coast, I have sometimes seen frigatebirds and truly they are magnificent! A bird that lives up to its name.

The Magnificent Frigatebird

by Ada Limon

Is it okay to begin with the obvious? I am full of stones—
            is it okay not to look out this window, but to look out another?

A mentor once said, You can't start a poem with a man looking

            out a window. Too many men looking out a window.

What about a woman? Today is a haunting. One last orange

            on the counter: it is a dead fruit. We swallow dead things.

Once, in Rio near Leblon, large seabirds soared over the vast

            South Atlantic Ocean. I had never seen them before.

Eight-foot wingspan and gigantic in their confident gliding, black,

            with a red neck like a wound or a hidden treasure. Or both.

When I looked it up, I learned it was the Magnificent Frigatebird.

            It sounded like that enormity of a bird had named itself.

What a pleasure to say, I am Magnificent. And, too, they traveled as a team,

            so I wondered if they named each other. Generously tapping

one another's deeply forked tail or their plumage, glistening with salt air,

            their gular sacs saying, You are Magnificent. You are also Magnificent.

It makes me want to give all my loves the adjectives they deserve:

            You are Resplendent. You are Radiant. You are Sublime.

I am far away from tropical waters. I have no skills for flight or wings

            to skim the waves effortlessly, like the wind itself. But from here,

I can still imagine rapture, a glorious caught fish in the mouth of a bird.