As the weeks of school become countable on two hands (“nine-ish,” as one of my advisees said), we will get caught up in the flurry of excitement around registration for next year’s courses, around spring sports season, around the changes that each closing and opening brings, around Culture Shock, Mt. Hood Service Day, and Cinco de Mayo, around elections for leadership positions and AP exams, around Everglow and prom and concerts, and yes, around the celebration that is graduation and the traditions that accompany the end of the year. But now we are in spring. Take it. And so here is a poem, Ada Limon’s “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.