An elderly Italian woman missed Air France flight 447 when she arrived too late to board the plane. She escaped death when the plane went down into the Atlantic, killing 228 people, only to die a week later in a head-on collision with a truck on a road in Austria. Events like this raise the question, is it fate, coincidence, or the hand of God, however God is defined. I confess I have not the answer, though I don’t believe our fate is written, chiseled in everlasting stone. Nonetheless, there are times I think the ancients had it right, that there are gods living among us, gods who know our fates, gods who shape our lives. In Germanic legend the mistresses of human destiny were the Norns, three spinners; Urd, who knew the past; Verthandi, who knew the present; and Skuld, who knew the future. It is they, the Norns, who shape the destiny of men. And who shall say they do not?

 

 

Here is the babe, the women said

In silence as they crept

Into the house and to the bed

Where little Barack slept

But hours old, Verthandi sighed

What know of him, dear Urd?

The past is blank, though I have tried

Of him there is no word

No past? said Skuld, how can that be?

Perhaps, dear Urd, you’ve missed

The lad’s now hidden history

For surely there’s a list

There is no list, no proof of birth

His presence unremarked

The lad has simply come to earth

We know not where embarked

But ‘tis the future of the lad

With which we must engage

His future now, if good or bad

Dear Skuld, please fill the page

I shall, dear Urd, and you will hear

Him promising much change

I see him bringing hope and fear

And what is passing strange

I see a country bending low

Accepting every whim

I see a people crying so

And all because of him

I see that freedom’s lost its way

And men do quake in fright

In hearing what this lad doth say

So say the fates tonight

Is there no hope, can naught be done?

It’s written now in stone?

Ah no, said Skuld, they’re saved from One

By Ronald Reagan’s clone