Acrostic Poem: Resilience

Resilience isn't all effort

Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash

Introduction

Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.¹

Thoughts and Explanations

I’ve been thinking about resilience, there is something about the way we discuss it that holds my attention.

When we discuss resilience, nearby is the concept of ‘hero’. We seem to have bonded resilience and will. I’ve never met anyone who explicitly claims this to be true. Nevertheless, there’s a hint of it wherever we find stories of triumph.

Resilience and will are certainly connected but they are not inseparable. In fact, a hero’s arc is a way resilience manifests in our stories and experiences. Another way is in nature, think of forests, fields, and even infants. Prior to the onset of ‘will power’ infants display astounding resilience. It’s because resilience is wrapped up in the fabric of life. We use our will to tap into it, but our will doesn’t create it.

I also find it tragically funny that so far in my life, I have been the primary cause for myself to be resilient. I am my greatest difficulty.

This poem is about identifying resilience in things that are not striving to be resilient, but are inherently resilient.

Poem and Details

The font for the poem is very small. I wrote an acrostic poem² but the spacing was wrong when I pasted it into Substack; heading 6 was the only way to fix it. I hope you can read it.

This poem has internal and end rhyme schemes throughout.

The first line lays out the rhyming pattern for the rest of the poem. The first type of internal rhyming³ words also rhyme with the end rhyming words.

• Internal Rhyming words: Seed,need,creed,speed,antecede,concede,bleed,mislead,indeed,read

• Internal Rhyming words: recovery, discovery, tea, reach, sea, key, inquiry, treachery,thee,cause

• End Rhyming words: weed, deed,mead,freed,greed,heed,processed,decreed,accede

‘Reach’ and ‘Cause’ were rhyming misses.

R est and reconsider, is effort the corrupting seed, even our recovery, is plagued by this native weed

E mblematic of the times, we seek, nay I say, we need, to find internal discovery, through heroic deed

S imple life solutions, keep trying that’s the creed, with a cup of matcha tea, with a cup of mead

I nterested in rising, at ambitious speed, we feel our prize is out of reach, from ourselves we must be freed

L imit all the striving, let ‘being’ antecede, find a shore, take in the sea, relinquish all your greed

I nterested in learning, a desire to concede, nature is or skeleton key, to nature we pay heed

E nticed by worldly pleasure, for possessions we will bleed, ponder this inquiry, does this pursuit our peace impede 

N ext time you want to rush, don’t let that sense mislead, urgency is treachery, patiently proceed

C onsider mother nature, does she hustle, no indeed, keep balance always before thee, long ago she has decreed

E njoy increased cohesion, situations you must read, don’t be resilience’s cause or need, go forth! I accede

1. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience#:~:text=Resilience%20is%20the%20process%20and,to%20external%20and%20internal%20demands.

2. A poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically.

3. Internal rhyme is rhyme that occurs in the middle of lines of poetry, instead of at the ends of lines.A single line of poetry can contain internal rhyme (with multiple words in the same line rhyming), or the rhyming words can occur across multiple lines.