The Conditional
Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.
Notes
What would we do if we knew the world was ending? In Ada Limón's The Conditional, the possibility of catastrophe becomes an intimate conversation between two people. Against the imagined destruction of the world, the poem turns toward something remarkably ordinary, the desire to remain together, to hold onto another person while everything familiar becomes uncertain. We often imagine hope as confidence that tomorrow will be better. Yet loving someone requires no such guarantee. Every relationship exists under conditions we cannot control, shaped by time, mortality, and the possibility of sudden loss. Perhaps tenderness becomes most meaningful when we recognize how little permanence we can promise each other. As October's Decay approaches its end, Limón offers a quieter form of resistance to despair. The future may remain uncertain, and the world may offer little reassurance, but we can still choose how to inhabit the present. Sometimes hope begins with the simple wish to stay beside someone a little longer. #AdaLimon #ContemporaryPoetry #AmericanPoetry #Existentialism #LoveAndMortality