What’s the point, now,
of crying, when you’ve cried
already, he said, as if he’d
never thought, or been told—
and perhaps he hadn’t—
Write down something
that doesn’t have to matter,
that still matters,
to you. Though I didn’t
know it then, those indeed
were the days. Random
corners, around one of which,
on that particular day,
a colony of bees, bound
by instinct, swarmed low
to the ground, so as
not to abandon the wounded
queen, trying to rise,
not rising, from the strip of
dirt where nothing had
ever thrived, really, except
in clumps the grass here
and there that we used to call
cowboy grass, I guess for its
toughness: stubborn,
almost, steadfast, though that’s
a word I learned early, each
time the hard way, not to use
too easily.
This poem has been excerpted from the collection You Are Here, edited by Ada Limón.