Thursday, February 03, 2011

These Are Dangerous and Confusing Times

For those unaware, everything you knew to be good and true has been SHATTERED:

The rest of us have a day's head start on you and let me warn you, it hasn't been easy. So, where do we turn in these uncertain times? This man:

William Butler Yeats, author of one of the four poems I can remember anything about


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;


Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;


The best lack all conviction,


while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.


Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.


The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,


A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,


Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.


The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,


And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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