It’s Not Written – a poem by Kate Rauner

Ka-Bala

Polished sticks, cards, or bones,

Coins or dice or sacred stones

Allow the mystic gods to choose

The message that you win or lose.

Cast the lots to tell the page,

A sacred text you cannot faze.

Within its pages it will show

All the answers you wish to know.

The I Ching offers sixty-four,

All your questions need no more.

The good news in a Coptic text

Has thirty-seven in the deck.

‘Patience prospers for the brave,

If with a whole heart you gave.’

‘Receive happiness and joy,

To do your utmost won’t annoy.’

Is it persistence towards your goal,

A vision that your mind will hold,

To struggle forward through the strife,

Are these the things that make a life?

Or was it written long ago

With vague meanings none can know

In a tiny book so grand

That put the future in your hand?

Bibliomancy – predicting the future with a book. A palm-sized codex over a thousand years old offered sage advice to Coptic Egyptians. [Live Science] The supplicant is urged to be brave and keep trying, not bad advice in any age. But I like what Shakespeare said in Julius Cesar: ���The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.���