How many million galaxies there are <br />Who knows? and each has countless stars in it, <br />And each rolls through eternities afar <br />Beneath the threshold of the Infinite. <br /> <br />How is it that will all that space to roam <br />I should have found this mote that spins and leaps <br />In what unutterable sunlight, foam <br />Of what unfathomable starry deeps <br /> <br />Who knows!? And how this thousand million souls <br />And half a thousand million souls of earth <br />That swarm, all bound for unimagined goals, <br />All pioneers of death enrolled at birth, <br /> <br />How were they swept away before my sight, <br />That I might stand upon the single prick <br />Of infinite space and time as infinite, <br />Who knows? Yet here I stand, climacteric, <br /> <br />Having found you. Was it by fall of chance? <br />Then what a stake against what odds I have won! <br />Was it determined in God's ordinance? <br />Then wondrous love and pity for His son! <br /> <br />Or was it part of an eternal law? <br />Then how ineffably beneficent! <br />Each thought excites an ecstasy of awe, <br />A rapture rending the mind's firmament. <br /> <br />Infinity -yet you and I have met. <br />Eternity -yet hand in hand we run. <br />All odds that I should lose you or forget, <br />But, soul and spirit and body, we are one. <br /> <br />Is this the child of Chance, or Law, or Will? <br />Is None or All or One to thank for this? <br />It will not matter if thanksgiving fill <br />The endless empyrean with a kiss.<br /><br />Aleister Crowley<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/long-odds/
