On Earth As It Is On Earth
Green and green and green, I speak
to the tree line, a booming body, trying
not to boom. I see myself as I once
was, hiding inside a manzanita outside
the ceramic studio, the mirrored rain
drops hanging on urn-shaped blooms
and soon, too, my strands of hair. There was
always a line where the rain fell and where
it didn’t. It was the line between abandonment
and freedom, loneliness and imagination.
How I waited in there, composing in my mind
a life without rules, without money, cruelty,
clocks, or clothes, how still I am the same,
in the green, in the green, waiting out the rain.•
Ada Limón, “On Earth As It Is On Earth,” from Startlement: New and Selected Poems (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with the permission of Milkweed Editions, milkweed.org.
Join us on November 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Limón will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss Startlement: New and Selected Poems. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
