The greening

Our new Poet Laureate is Ada Limón, and early this morning a friend sent me an exquisite sonnet Limón wrote about the greening of the trees.

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.

https://poets.org/poem/instructions-not-giving 

I had an appointment for my third Covid booster this afternoon, but when I got there I was rejected, as the Oregon legislature has to approve this booster and hasn’t yet done so (misinformation concerning Covid and precautions is now rampant and chaotic). On my way there and back, I looked with attentive eyes at the greening of the trees, like fists to open palms. Willing to take it. Take it all.

I think about the young women protesters I know who still aren’t having regular periods, whose menstrual cycles were knocked out of whack by tear gas during the protests of 2020. I thought about the one who was pregnant and lost the baby from the affects of the tear gas. There was an excellent article about them, including an interview with Teressa Raiford, in the Guardian, for which I'm grateful.

*A note on the image. The leaves were backlit just as you see them; original shot with no edits in Extra. It was a marvelous moment, not something I created in processing.