Today’s poem is by a recent discovery of mine: the American poet Ada Limón. She reminds me of one of my favourite poets, Mary Oliver, whose poem ‘Breakage’ was the first I chose as my Poem of the Day, and who also thinks sensitively about how to live, using striking natural imagery. Limón adds to this a more political awareness of the world she has come from.
I almost chose her poem ‘How to Triumph Like a Girl‘, because it has such fantastic energy and pace, with its short lines and frequent caesura. However, I couldn’t help but be drawn to this slower poem, called ‘Instructions on Not Giving Up’. Without the title, it could almost be read as a simple description of nature, of the world coming back to life after winter. It isn’t your usual description of spring: the blossoms are a ‘shock of white/and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets’. The idea of sweets and trinkets suggest that spring might not be all about that first explosion of sugary delight. We have to wait instead for the ‘Patient, plodding’ leaves.
At times, these months have felt plodding. Although it has been spring, I can imagine exactly what Limón means when she suggests the leaves have to grow ‘over whatever winter did to us’. The title of the poem tells me, though, that we cannot be like some poets who sit and just observe nature. Like the tree says, rather delightfully grumpily, ‘Fine, then,/I’ll take it’. What have you got next for me, world?
I’m not sure what has made Limón want to give up, when she wrote this poem. Was she ill? Does she, like many of us, feel gloomy when the days are short? Did she lose someone? Did the effort of trying to make the world a better place get the better of her? She doesn’t tell us, so that the poem is about all of the above, and more.
Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbors
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, its the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the worlds 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,
Ill take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, Ill take it all.
