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 Limón

Born March 28, 1976, in Sonoma, California, was influenced by the visual arts, particularly by her mother, Stacia Brady. She earned an MFA in creative writing from New York University in 2001.

Limón’s first collection, Lucky Wreck (2006), won the Autumn House Poetry Prize. Other works include The Hurting Kind (2022), The Carrying (2018), Bright Dead Things (2015), Sharks in the Rivers (2010), and This Big Fake World (2006). She also edited You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (2024).

Limón is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, MacArthur Fellow, and recipient of the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She became U.S. poet laureate in 2022 and was reappointed for a second term in 2023. Limón splits her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.