There is a madness rising in the world.
I feel it quite severely.
Seek sanctuary in the sacred…your life, your family, your friends…but especially your home, Mother Earth. I hope against hope to keep beauty alive in this little place.
Politicians drag their overblown egos to parliamentary podiums to huff and puff their cursed words of war .
There is nothing to stop their vile spewing of death and revenge, for our media is the dog that laps at the floor!
In a desperate attempt at solace, I turned into the pages of a book.
I was in search of inspiration, any small morsel of comfort, or even defiance.
The Second Coming was penned in the stunned aftermath of WWI.
This time, I fear it takes the place of a prologue… for what lies ahead.
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)