This has a line that’s on theme for the month (“What were you wearing? Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?”) and also a construction that makes me want to be in a poetry analysis class again–it looks like a sonnet and the internal rhymes make it feel like one, but it technically isn’t. Whatever it is, it’s a delight, like all of Ada’s poems.
While Everything Else Was Falling Apart
by Ada Limón
In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen
years ago now, the L train came clanking by
where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart
on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day
(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).
Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one
(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?
Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?
A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce
churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept
repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say
this made you want to live? No hand to hold
still here it was: someone giving someone comfort
and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.