The Second Coming

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: somewhere in 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?
~~William Butler Yeats, 1919


My response~~

Now I know..

A blank gaze 
Of a pitiless Sun has
Ignited a flame exposing
Painful perceptions of
Separation and anarchy..
These vexations of centuries
Are now visioned
As garments clothing 
My rough beast 
Slouching toward
Bethlehem for a
Flaming reentry and
A naked recognition
Of what I am...

Now I know...