Poetry

Josef Koudelka

By

Abigail Rathbone

An Argument

How I envy that sure certitude:

You swear you know there’s something meant to be;

Your bias seems to me so strangely skewed,

Denying chance with Fate’s reality.

Of course there’s comfort when an ordained plan

Unfolds, still randomness seems truer to the real

Description of the life of every man

Who lives outside the so-called Karmic wheel.

What once was “Stars” now’s coded in our genes.

That’s Fate enough, the rest is our free will

To write our scripts and find the ways and means

To toil up the Sisyphean hill.

It all ends up the same though we may clash

And you lie in the ground while I am ash.

Beethoven’s Birthday

Happy Birthday Beethoven!

In person probably a huge pain

Relentless, serious, stringent;

Not only didn’t you suffer fools gladly-

You would have annihilated them in

Your path had you been able

To summon thunderbolts from your brow.

You did summon thunderbolts from your brain

Which even now,

Are among the few things left in this world

To preserve humanity with its

Sinking self-esteem.

Abigail Rathbone

Abigail Rathbone has been writing both short fiction and poetry “on and off” for 50+ years. A retired copywriter she now spends much of her time buying and selling old books, some of which she reads.