Poetry, with horses and stars

This is the second in a series of four posts for National Poetry Month. Half will be - like this one - available to all subscribers. If you’d like to read the full series, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Paying subscriptions help support my work here, and my writing in general.

Like many young girls, I was horse crazy. Part of that passion was a love for horse racing (I was young, as I said, and didn’t know anything at all about the sport beyond its superficial glory.) I loved to ride, and I loved to ride fast, and I was desperately sad that my very tall parents meant that I would probably never be able to be a jockey.

So I loved the Kentucky Derby, loved it immensely, and I still remember watching Winning Colors win in 1988 – Winning Colors being only one of three fillies to ever win. So it’s probably no wonder that I loved the first poem I ever read from Ada Limón, “How to Triumph Like a Girl.”

I’ve since come to know and love her work in general, to love it in that way where I feel extremely delighted when something amazing happens in her career, like the fact that she’s the current Poet Laureate of the United States, or that she was asked to write a poem that will be sent into space on the Europa Clipper mission.

(Incidentally, I also kind of love – no, I fully, love, unironically and with my entire self – the fact that we (as in humanity) send poetry to space. That when we think of what belongs among the stars, of what we would share, if there is anyone out there to find it, we think to send poems.)

One of my favorite poems of Limón’s also involves space. Not so much being out among it, but looking up, and asking questions. It’s about seeing the miraculous amid the mundane, about dreaming, and asking questions, and still making sure the practical things get done. From her collection The Carrying, here is “Dead Stars.”