Resignation

Big Frank is taken with poems on the theme of acceptance or resignation. There have been a few previous posts on this subject from Wendell Berry, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. Of course, no mention of acceptance or resignation is complete without bringing in the Stoics and Big Franks's main man: Marcus Aurelius. Below is another poem on this topic - this centering not on birds at sea, or the animals in the field, but birches and oaks.

Resignation

I like trees because they seem more resigned

to the way they have to live than other things do.

--Willa Cather

Here the oak and silver-breasted birches
Stand in their sweet familiarity
While underground, as in a black mirror,
They have concealed their tangled grievances,
Identical to the branching calm above
But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold
On what gives life to which is brutal enough.
Still, in the air, none tries to keep company
Or change its fortune. They seem to lean
On the light, unconcerned with what the world
Makes of their decencies, and will not show
A jealous purchase on their length of days.
To never having been loved as they wanted
Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation
Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced
To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.

---- by J. D. McClatchy