Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at a clip from the movie “The Hours [2002] – Flowers, what a beautiful morning“ and read the poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón, posted below.

Our prompt was: “An obscene display of color.”

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The Hours [2002] – Flowers, what a beautiful morning

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. 
Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.