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