Optimism

Today’s Easter poem from Education for Justice is by Jane Hirshfield.

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Source: Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems, by Jane Hirshfeld, New York: Harper
Perennial, 2002. p. 71