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.