---
title: "New 350 Writer: Jane Hirshfield"
date: 2009-10-21T14:11:06Z
modified: 2009-10-21T14:16:57Z
permalink: "https://350.org/new-350-writer-jane-hirshfield-0/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: Jane Hirshfield has won most of the awards an American poet can win--check out her most recent collection, After.
wpid: 11376
author: Bill McKibben
---

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_