This is Episode 69 of Poems for the Speed of Life. Today's poem is "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón.

Ada Limon is an American poet and, since 2022, the US Poet Laureate, the first Latina-American woman to hold that position. She has published five collections of poetry.

This poem is a sonnet, 14 lines, but it defies the structure that often seems to come with the sonnet form. It is defiant in more than structure too. It looks beyond the colour of spring—nature’s “baubles and trinkets”—to look at what lies beneath that colour: the “strange idea of continuous living, the thing that runs through us all, carrying us through the endless seasons, and that carries on through life and death itself.

It tells us of the permanence of the world, in both brightness and dullness, and acts, I think, as a sort of life-raft to hold onto on those darker days.

⁠You can read the poem here⁠.

This is the second Wendell Berry poem to feature on this podcast. Scroll in your podcast player to find Episode 32, "Do Not Be Ashamed".

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Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | ⁠https://onsound.eu/⁠  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com