I have been awake since 4 a.m., which I suspect might be my sleep pattern for the next couple of weeks. I am anxious. It’s been a good time to consider poetry as a gift to be passed down, undiluted, generation to generation. This poem found me this morning, and I’m still clinging to it. While ‘tis the season to watch leaves fall rather than unfurl, I can appreciate what’s continuous: the defiant cycle of greening, despite.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Divine!
I have goosebumps! Thank you, as always, thank you.