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Optimism

Jane Hirshfield

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.


Jane Hirshfield

from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005)

Reproduced by permission of the author and the publisher.

Tags:

American poetry evolution Optimism & Happiness perseverance possibility resilience trees
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Jane Hirshfieldb.1953

Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven books of poetry, including the recently published Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011, Bloodaxe, 2012) and a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997). Bloodaxe has also brought...
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