Jane Hirshfield has won most of the awards an American poet can win–check out her most recent collection, After. We’re very thankful for the gift of these words:
Optimism
by 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.
for Project 350, in strong hope