Hello Friends,
I got dumped this week, and Poetry Month was briefly in danger of becoming a bunch of angsty breakup poems. But lucky for you! I think I've come to my senses enough to feature a more optimistic take today.
Sometimes when you're a poet and it's spring (and maybe particularly if you are in DC), you see something poetic like the cherry blossoms, and you think you should write a sonnet about them. But then sometimes the sonnet you end up writing isn't about the cherry blossoms at all — it's about the leaves.
Enjoy.
Ellen
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.
■
Ada Limón's "Instructions on Not Giving Up" was featured for Poets.org Poem-a-Day series on May 15, 2017. Ada Limón was also featured for Meet Me in 811's Poem-A-Day April 2, 2017 and Poem-A-Day April 7, 2016.