Sonnet: "what we can accomplish"

what we can accomplish

Unreachable — what once was thought of peaks
surmounting icy mountains, or of shores
across a vicious sea, these quests of weeks
and years — requiring lives and loves and stores
to be abandoned — taxed the hearts and minds
of those for whom these goals must be achieved
to prove that will surpassed their range. The binds
on our endeavors make what we've conceived
mere hills among the mountains, yet their height
permits us to describe our small success
as being that, and we can also cite
repeatability, for what is less
than what the journals write as history
becomes an often-practiced mystery.