Ada Limón’s “The Burying Beetle”

From The New Yorker's archive: an exquisite meditation on the intimate cycles of mortality and renewal.  View in browser | Update your preferences Photograph by Max Belchenko / Shutterstock Poems "The Burying Beetle" "Sure, I know / what it is to be lonely, but today's special / is a physical need to be touched by someone / decent, a pulsing palm to the back." By Ada Limón The Mexican American poet Ada Limón composes arresting, fearless verses about the convergence of melancholy and the natural world. Since 2009, Limón has contributed seven pieces to The New Yorker. The author of six books, including "Bright Dead Things" and "The Carrying," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2018, Limón writes about our uncertainties and fierce vulnerabilities with unflinching emotional acuity. Her most recent collection of poems, "The Hurting Kind," was released last month. In 2017, The New Yorker published "The Burying Beetle," Limón's exquisite meditation on the intimate cycles of mortality and renewal. In it, the narrator tends her garden on a hot summer day. Various flora and fauna stretch out and soothe her as she considers her partner's absence and the persistent afflictions of the world:  I don't feel I deserve this time, or the small plot of earth I get to mold into  someplace livable. I lost God awhile ago.  And I don't want to pray, but I can picture  the plants deepening right now into the soil,  wanting to live . . . Limón's interpretations of grief are vivid and tactile. We move as the narrator moves, as every weed is pulled and each seed is planted. Her poem is both a keening wail and a lucid benediction. Is there any greater gift, Limón seems to ask, than an ability to cultivate our own quotidian worlds, our own delicate plots of earth—reminding ourselves that we, too, will continue to grow as long as we draw breath? The planet may be in chaos around us, yet there is beauty and solace to be found even among the weeds. With each modest breath, there remains within us a sharp desire to live, just like plants spreading their tendrils in supplication so that they, too, might bask under the prismatic intensity of the sun.    —Erin Overbey, archive editor More from the Archive Poems "The End of Poetry" From 2020: "Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower." By Ada Limón Poems "Privacy" From 2021: "What news / are they bringing of our world to the world / of the gods?" By Ada Limón You're receiving this e-mail because you signed up for the New Yorker Classics newsletter. Was this e-mail forwarded to you? Sign up.   Unsubscribe | Manage your e-mail preferences | Send newsletter feedback | View our privacy policy    The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links in our newsletters as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers.    Copyright © Condé Nast 2022. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.