Saturday, November 19, 2016

Sharp right

Other people's baths: I crawl back into the womb as often as I need to; for reading and thinking, also to listen as the south-easter rips, shreds, tears its way down The Mountain and through the apartments, nooks and crannies of beach shorts- and slipslop- wearing white middleclassedness. 

Nature seems so safe to turn to, even in its rage, in the face of this last week's new world order: DJT.

The Second Coming
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?

- William Butler Yeats (1865 -1939)