The Second Coming
The other night over drinks at my favorite cafe my friend fired out a great quote.
We were discussing movies, politics, sociology, and of course…women that walked by as we sat outside on the sidewalk. It was a great conversation which happens frequently at my little cafe. I feel like this poem, which he quoted verbatim to the full moon summer night sky, is very important. It seems to address many of my feelings and anxieties. It seems to address current events. It is, as they say, where I’m at.
THE SECOND COMING
W.B. Yeats
“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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?”
