Falling Out of Fate

      There was no temple for Fate.

                                                   How could there be?

No god was less fixed in time nor less subject 

to the constraints of mythology.

                                                   When the Sacred was replaced 

by the Sublime, Heaven by Nature, the Mystical

by the Wondrous,

                           it was a change in name only,

                                                                        a translation

from one language into another.

                                                 But when Fate was replaced 

by Being, the aftershock struck home.

                                                            Local time was 

measured out, round-the-clock, by the ticking of a clock, 

the human form recalibrated

                                           to human scale.

      People in cafés debated the power of Reason, 

as did philosophers

                             and mathematicians, resolved, at last,

to take their lives in their own hands.

      All the while, over their shoulders, listening in, 

Fate’s yet-unheard-of-

                                  sister Karma (goddess

                                                                of cause 

and consequence), leveled-out her balance scale:

                       with what measure ye mete

                       it shall be measured to you again