Inherited Fire
Of all the souls stitched into our family’s tapestry,
yours burns brightest with Gramma’s unyielding fire—
that old, indomitable flame passed down like heirloom iron.
You arrived already at war:
the cord coiled tight around your infant throat
like a noose fashioned by chance itself,
yet you kicked, you fought, you breathed—
a first rebellion against the very air that tried to claim you.
Honesty became your banner, raised high and unapologetically.
After five days in the plain schoolhouse of the Amish,
where children played without deceit at recess,
you returned carrying their quiet creed like a sword:
truth is not negotiable; it simply stands.
And when the bully rode the bus like a petty tyrant,
you met his cruelty with a fierce, righteous reckoning—
a lesson delivered in heat and precision,
body to body, will to will.
You could have broken more than his pride,
but mercy arrived in the same breath as justice:
when his lesson was learned, you let the moment end.
Yet wisdom runs deeper still, the common sense of Gramma
settled in your bones before most children learn to count years.
At ten, Mrs. White paid you to sweep the goat barn clean of spider webs.
Broom in hand, you paused—saw the geometry of capture,
You declared them perfect flycatchers.The job was done the way nature intended—
not by force of broom, but by recognition of what already works.
Now forty winters have crowned you, son,
forty circles of the sun since that first defiant breath,
and still the same fierce spirit strides through your days—
tempered now, like good steel, by time and love and living.
The boy who fought the cord, who guarded truth, who spared the bully’s last measure,
who trusted spider silk over a sweeping hand,
stands here today: son, husband, keeper of the line,
carrying Gramma’s fire not as spark, but as steady hearth.
Forty years, and the poem of you is only midway sung—
each verse stronger, each refrain truer,
a living legacy that refuses to dim.
Happy birthday, my fighter.
The fire still burns bright.
Love, dad