ODT #6 : return

In January I settled on One Difficult Truth to try to keep in mind for the year, rather than One Little Word.  This truth is briefly best expressed as "Life is gorgeous AND bitter" or "this excruciating, beautiful life"--take your pick.  The point is the paradox.

Thanks to Ruth at There Is No Such Thing As a Godforsaken Town, I have another poem to add to my collection of ODT poems.

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.

It would appear that Ada specializes in these sorts of poems, just based on the titles of her collections:
"Ada Limón is the author of Lucky Wreck (2006), This Big Fake World (2006), Sharks in the Rivers (2010), and Bright Dead Things (2015)."

"...a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us..."