A sonnet, contemplating the reasons for taking chances

swing for the boundary

What kinds of risk are those that we can find
acceptable? For some of us wish not
e'en scant amounts of danger, with a mind
for safety by the simplest path to plot
toward lands of soft serenity. Yet that
is not the way of those who see the face
of nervelessness as when they take the bat
into their hands and man the crease, the space
where they can fully fail, yet if they swing
and hit and run, they have a chance to win --
and for that to occur, their offering
is courage and their penalty akin
to endings, brutal or sublime, the fate
that all must face though none shall know the date.