Instructions on Not Giving Up
More than
the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the
crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost
obscene display of cherry limbs showing
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.
- Ada Limon
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