a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.
These lines stand out starkly: whereas most of the poem is populated with crisp, specific visual images, these lines grasp broadly at murky, abstract concepts. Even the wording "the strange idea" seems to be attempting to express the ineffable, something indescribable. Here is the emotional core of the poem, what all the vivid spring images point towards: the hurts that linger in the speaker and the urge to give up. "[C]ontinuous living" is key to Ada Limón's writing and helps explain why she is a well-loved artist and national Poet Laureate. As a poet, she rarely endeavors to tell the reader how they should live; even more universally, she writes about the fact that we are alive, and we are all making our own sense of what to do with that. Life goes on, these lines tell us, in spite of the hardships, and Limón is a nonjudgmental companion on that journey.
Fine then,
I'll take it, the tree seems to say
Because of the enjambment across the line break, we may initially read "Fine then" as coming from the speaker of the poem herself. Limón achieves a brilliant collision of identity in these last two and a half lines: the defiant dialogue "Fine then, / I'll take it... / I'll take it all" is coming from both the speaker and the tree. We may infer from this union that the transfer of inspiration—of strength and resilience—from tree to human is complete, and the speaker leaves the poem with a newfound core of strength.
