Gratitude #63 Ok so I know I posted this poem by Ada Limon a few days (or weeks) ago (who knows?!🤣) but I can’t get it out of my head so I’m posting it again. I love this thought that when the bad stuff comes, we would stand there like a tree and just be like, ‘I’ll take it!’ This life is so gloriously complicated and messy and wonderful all at the same time. Here it is
Gratitude #63 Ok so I know I posted this poem by Ada Limon a few days (or weeks) ago (who knows?!🤣) but I can’t get it out of my head so I’m posting it again. I love this thought that when the bad stuff comes, we would stand there like a tree and just be like, ‘I’ll take it!’ This life is so gloriously complicated and messy and wonderful all at the same time. Here it is:
Instructions on Not Giving Up
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 Limon
#gratitude #gratitudepoem
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This poem is featured in my book ‘Voice at the Window: one hundred gratitude poems written during lockdown’ by Elisabeth Pike. It was published with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and is out now. You can get it here: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/870191768/voice-at-the-window-one-hundred?ref=shop_home_active_9&frs=1
elisabeth pike 