LONG ODDS

          How many million galaxies there are

            Who knows? and each has countless stars in it,

          And each rolls through eternities afar

            Beneath the threshold of the Infinite.



          How is it that will all that space to roam

            I should have found this mote that spins and leaps

          In what unutterable sunlight, foam

            Of what unfathomable starry deeps



          Who knows!?  And how this thousand million souls

            And half a thousand million souls of earth

          That swarm, all bound for unimagined goals,

            All pioneers of death enrolled at birth,



          How were they swept away before my sight,

            That I might stand upon the single prick

          Of infinite space and time as infinite,

            Who knows?  Yet here I stand, climacteric,



          Having found you.  Was it by fall of chance?

            Then what a stake against what odds I have won!

          Was it determined in God's ordinance?

            Then wondrous love and pity for His son!



          Or was it part of an eternal law?

            Then how ineffably beneficent!

          Each thought excites an ecstasy of awe,

            A rapture rending the mind's firmament.  {61}



          Infinity --- yet you and I have met.

            Eternity --- yet hand in hand we run.

          All odds that I should lose you or forget,

            But, soul and spirit and body, we are one.



          Is this the child of Chance, or Law, or Will?

            Is None or All or One to thank for this?

          It will not matter if thanksgiving fill

            The endless empyrean with a kiss.

ALEISTER CROWLEY

{62}