Tempered Steel Poem by Sonny Rainshine

All the highpoints of his life
were like bookmarks, beauty marks,
landmarks, delineating his passage
through this enchanted region
where all things are captivated
by gravity and by the gravity
of having been born.

Like all of us,
he did his best.
He married young, but not for love;
love seemed to him an abstract thing,
too mythologized to make much difference.

He resented those who insisted
that failure was the fault of the man,
that fortune had no function in the destiny
of us all.

Cruel! Unbearably cruel,
indifferent and merciless
Lady Fortune could be, the bully.

But strength and courage
do not come to the coddled kind,
those ones who never flirt with fate
and who glide through life
without resistance.
This man would mark his
place in the book
of the struggle
and carry on until the last page.