The Raincoat

Ada Limon - MacArthur Grantee, and current US Poet Laureate (2024)

(1976 - )

Here is our final poem for Poetry Month 2024. It is fitting that it is by the current US Poet Laureate. I hope you have enjoyed reading the poems and perhaps sharing them with others.

One more thank you to Kathrina Dubnicek and Stephanie Grady Clay. They imagined and then created Poetry Telos - the web site that made this year's Poetry Month much easier for me and for all of us. That same website makes it possible to return to the poems we have encountered over the last nine years.

The Raincoat

When the doctor suggested surgery

and a brace for all my youngest years,

my parents scrambled to take me

to massage therapy, deep tissue work,

osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine

unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,

and move more in a body unclouded

by pain. My mom would tell me to sing

songs to her the whole forty-five minute

drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-

five minutes back from physical therapy.

She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered

by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,

because I thought she liked it. I never

asked her what she gave up to drive me,

or how her day was before this chore.

Today, at her age, I was driving myself home from yet

another spine appointment, singing along

to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,

and I saw a mom take her raincoat off

and give it to her young daughter when

a storm took over the afternoon.

My god, I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her

raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel that I never got wet.

From The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018) by Ada Limón. Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón. Used with the permission of Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org.

Here is a link to a reading of the poem.

A word about the poet:

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and wrote a poem that will be engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper Spacecraft that will be launched to the second moon of Jupiter in October 2024.

As the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world. She will serve as Poet Laureate until the spring of 2025. In October of 2023 she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, and she was named a TIME magazine woman of the year in 2024.