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# Instructions on Not Giving Up
- URL: https://poetry101.love/instructions-on-not-giving-up/
- Published: 2024-03-19T15:40:51.000Z
- Updated: 2024-03-19T15:40:51.000Z
- Description: by Ada Limon
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Ada Limon, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

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.

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Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.