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 to another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistance arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs -- all this resinous, unretractable earth.
Source: PoetryMagazine.com http://www.poetrymagazine.com/archives/2001/Holiday2001/hirshfield.htm
About Jane Hirschfield
Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. After receiving her B.A. from Princeton University in their first graduating class to include women, she went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. In addition to her work as a freelance writer and translator, Hirshfield has taught at UC Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and been Elliston Visiting Poet at the University of Cincinnati. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently on the faculty of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.