Some time ago, we published a PDF Toolkit of Questions to Ask Before Giving Up. Perhaps as good or better is poet Ada Limón‘s poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up”, which provides powerful instruction of another sort. A friend read it to us this morning and we were instantly heartened.
(If you’d like it READ to you, hear Limón herself read it here, perfectly. And then call someone up and read it to them.)
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.

…
…it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me…
…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.

Limón writes frequently for the New Yorker (more poems here ) and has published several books of poetry; her latest, Bright Dead Things, was a Finalist for the National Book Award.
With thanks to David Saltman.
Thank you! I really needed this today. I will pay it forward.
Thank you for this. Sometimes giving up seems so overwhelmingly OK. Well….. thank you.