Poetry Friday: Spring (NPM: Day 5)

For National Poetry Month, I've been doing daily posts of tabs I had open on my desktop. Sometimes I save things for a very long time because I have plans to reread them or want to use them as mentor texts. Sure, I could bookmark them to come back later, but I tell myself that keeping them visible will make me more likely to return to them. Somehow posting them on my blog has enabled me to close many of the windows this week. Call it spring cleaning.

Here are the week's posts:
On Monday I posted an Andrew Peterson song, "To All the Poets."
On Tuesday I became an Irene Latham fangirl, posting links to several of her posts I'd saved. I also added an original poem I wrote using one of hers as a mentor text.
On Wednesday I wrote about Tracy K. Smith's poetry podcast. (I didn't close this window, though.)
On Thursday I posted about memorizing poems, with an essay by Billy Collins and a YouTube channel chronicling Steven Wasserman's memorization project.

Today's poem is one I first encountered in the Poets.org Poem-a-Day email. (You can sign up for that here.) I love how Ada Limón uses the metaphor of spring, making it not just about rebirth and renewal but about healing and persistence and not quitting.

Instructions on Not Giving Up
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 love a spring poem with a little edge to it like this one.  I paired two spring poems in this post back in 2010, one by Edna St. Vincent Millay which is sharp and bitter, and another by Gerard Manley Hopkins, gushing about how lovely it all is (though Hopkins certainly wrote lots of much darker poems). This one seems sort of in-between, with its surprising word choices like "obscene" and "shoving," "shock" and "aftermath," but then its (sort of) hopeful acceptance at the end: "a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite/ the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,/ I'll take it..."

I've been enjoying the NPM activities.  Today's Progressive Poem line is here. Mine is coming up on Sunday! Here's the full schedule:

April

1 Matt @ Radio, Rhythm and Rhyme

2 Kat @ Kathryn Apel

3 Kimberly @ KimberlyHutmacherWrites

4 Jone @ DeoWriter

5 Linda @ TeacherDance

6 Tara @ Going to Walden

7 Ruth @ thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown

8 Mary Lee @ A Year of Reading

9 Rebecca @ Rebecca Herzog

10 Janet F. @ Live Your Poem

11 Dani @ Doing the Work that Matters

12 Margaret @ Reflections on the Teche

13 Doraine @ Dori Reads

14 Christie @ Wondering and Wandering

15 Robyn @ Life on the Deckle Edge

16 Carol @ Beyond LiteracyLink

17 Amy @ The Poem Farm

18 Linda @ A Word Edgewise

19 Heidi @ my juicy little universe

20 Buffy @ Buffy's Blog

21 Michelle @ Michelle Kogan

22 Catherine @ Reading to the Core

23 Penny @ a penny and her jots

24 Tabatha @ The Opposite of Indifference

25 Jan @ Bookseestudio

26 Linda @ Write Time

27 Sheila @ Sheila Renfro

28 Liz @ Elizabeth Steinglass

29 Irene @ Live Your Poem

30 Donna @ Mainely Write

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here, at Karen Edmisten's blog, which does indeed have a shockingly clever title.