Instructions on Not Giving Up
The long awaited day has arrived! Winter is finally over. The crocuses are popping their tiny heads out of the still-thawing ground. The sun is lingering longer in the sky. The birds are venturing from their nests to sing in celebration. Warmth and color are returning to our cold, grey world.
As Ada Limón counsels us in her poem, "whatever winter did to us,” we can take heart in the fact that the sun will eventually return, that life will begin again, and that we can dare to keep hoping even when the days once again grow dark.
Happy Spring Equinox!
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.
(from The Carrying by Ada Limón, Milkweed Editions, 2021)
