Ada Limón’s Poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up” Is the Perfect Anthem
I used to think I wrote poems in order to help readers recommit to the world. I wanted to believe I was using my intense attention to nature, to beauty, to language in order to offer proof that we should keep surviving. But through the years, I’ve realized the person I am writing for the most is myself. I am the one who needs to be reminded that this life holds all sorts of goodness even when it is often shoved to the edges by the enormity of ugliness or fear. The poems I write, the ones that offer shreds of hope or gratitude, are written because I need that hope or gratitude desperately in that moment—I need it the way plants need light.
Four years ago, almost to the day, I wrote just such a poem—out of necessity. After a particularly hard winter, I was walking through our neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky, and had trouble appreciating even the gorgeous flaunting of colors the trees were offering. A crab apple tree in the backyard was almost iridescent in its flashy dark pink blossoms; the street was lined with sweet yellow daffodils; the forsythia brightened various corners of the block. Still, my mind remained stuck at the bottom of the well.
I walked the dog noticing all the showy blossoms, some strewn on the pavement after the rain—as if the party was already over. It wasn’t until I paused under the huge silver maple tree in front of our house that I began to notice not the blossoms, but the way the leaves were unfurling. How suddenly a tree transformed back into a tree, with all its good green leaves. It felt like a lesson in resilience. The tree wasn’t giving up. The tree was just going to keep doing its tree thing. Noticing those leaves felt like the first moment of breath I’d had all winter. Under that tree, the line “it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me” came to me.
I came back into the house and wrote the poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up” while standing in the kitchen. It came out all at once, like listening to a song you’ve heard before. The familiar music rushed through me, the way the blossoms give way to a more ornate musicality, the way the ending showed me what I needed in that moment. When I finished, the poem was complete. Just like that, as if dropped down from the tree itself.
Part of the work I am interested in during this life is learning what I can from the natural world. There are times where I can witness something happening in nature and feel all the human clutter wash off me. I can remember that I am an animal—that I am nature. What hubris to believe I’m not.
A few months later, my poem was published on the Academy of American Poetry website as part of their Poem-A-Day series. I had thought of it as a small quiet poem of reflection, something born of a personal moment that had ushered me out of harsh winter into a new state of acceptance and a surrender to ongoingness. But as I saw the outpouring of responses on social media, I realized I wasn’t the only one who needed that tree, who needed to be reminded that continuing can also be a choice.
It has been four years since that poem first came to me under the silver maple, and today, that tree is just now leafing out. I am eager to see how it fills in this year, after yet another hard winter, made more difficult by the pandemic—after it all. This year my interest in ongoingness has deepened, my relationship to gratitude has deepened as has my appreciation for the tree—my teacher.
This spring, somehow the poem is being widely shared once again, but by now it feels less like my poem—it’s the tree’s poem, belonging to spring. I love seeing how a poem can move through the world without me. It doesn’t need my body or my ego attached to it; it’s like a samara floating on the wind looking for some new place to land. I am sheltering in place, but my poems are moving all around. What a remarkable and unexpected thing.
I can only hope that “Instructions on Not Giving Up” might be just that for someone out there. I’d like to be more like that tree. Opening up to the world again, shaking everything off in the wind, letting trouble blow through me, not blowing me over.
“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.
From The Carrying by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018). Copyright ? 2018 by Ada Limón. Reprinted with permission from the author.
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