A different reading about that chance meeting that grows to love

Phew!              By Dannie Abse

Do you know that Sumerian proverb

'A man's wife is his destiny'?

But supposing you'd been here,

this most strange of meeting places,

5000 years too early? Or me,

a fraction of a century too late?

No angel with SF wings

would have beckoned,

'This way, madam, this way, sir.'

Have you ever, at a beach,

aimed one small pebble

at another, thrown high, higher?

And though what ends

happily

is never the end,

and though the secret is

there's another secret always,

because this, because that,

because on high the Blessèd

were playing ring-a-ring-o'-roses,

because millions of miles below,

during the Rasoumovsky,

the cellist, pizzicati,

played a comic, wrong note,

you looked to the right, luckily,

I looked to the left, luckily.