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.

~ From Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins 2001)
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I’m Going to Start Living Like a Mystic by Edward Hirsch

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Old Iron by Naomi Shihab Nye