Spring's First Daffodil

Thank You Ada Limon

Last spring, I was in a nature writing class. I happen to be housesitting for the professor who taught the class while she is off frolicking through Italy’s country side. She tasked us with writing a poem inspired by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon’s poem “Instructions on not Giving Up.” I’m sure I’ve referred to this poem before as it described the comfort of spring in a way I had always wished to.

“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.”

It never gets old. I refer to it on days when the slow green skin of spring creeps over every branch on every tree and days when the defeat of winter’s grip feels too great to bear. The promise of spring is what gets me through the winter. This poem a reminder that it always happens again.

The first sign of spring is a small one that grows on the side of the road and in vacant lots. Its bright yellow exterior feels like an exclamation point against the unsaturated surroundings of February. So I wrote a poem about the small flower that sees spring’s surety before we dare to dream of it.