Instructions on Not Giving Up by Ada Limon

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.

---

“I’ll take it all.” This is so the antithesis of the turning away from life but instead trusting in the capacity for renewal, “ a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us…”. I have noticed this in the hurts behind me, the heartaches I know are yet in front of me. The earth continues to teach us that what comes after the hurt, the closing, the loss is the possibility of opening again, full force, no holding back.

Ada Limón, Instructions on Not Giving Up. From The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018. This is the book that won her the National Book Critics Circle Award. Ada Limón became U.S. Poet Laureate in 2022 (renewed 2023) — the 24th laureate and the first Latina to hold the position.