What Is Forged Will Stand

by Al Konda

I didn’t write this poem in a moment of ease.

I wrote it while thinking about what remains when wonder quiets, when time presses, when the days stop asking how we feel and start asking what we’re made of.

This poem isn’t about discovering love. It’s about choosing to make it endure.

The vow in this piece doesn’t bloom; it roots. It takes hold in granite, in steel, in the slow work of becoming something that can be tested without shattering. I wanted love here to feel like a craft learned under pressure — not a spark that dazzles, but a form that holds.

There’s a moment in the poem where two lives “knot beyond repair.” I meant that seriously. Repair is not always the goal. Sometimes the truest bonds are the ones that accept irreversibility and grow stronger because they do.

Time, in this poem, is not an enemy. It’s the forge. Seasons strike sparks. Years temper edges. Memory fades. Myths tire. Even gods exhaust themselves into flame. What remains is not intensity, but structure born of wonder.

I believe wonder isn’t meant to stay soft. It’s meant to be shaped.

If this poem has a quiet conviction, it’s this:

what is made carefully, what is sworn without illusion, what is tested rather than protected — stands.

Not because it was lucky.

But because it was forged.

Read the full poem and analysis tomorrow 29th: https://alkonda.com/2026/01/29/what-is-forged-will-stand/

© Al Konda · The Poetry Elite