Azure rivers flow
entwined, a
force of nature
while
their scarlet kin
exist
persist
drawn from
courageous hearts
Category: Poetry
The suburbs
a continually cracking
edifice to an illusion
My friend tells me
moonlight collects in
pools each night
yet in the morning
I find only
water •
William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” the year after World War I. It’s better known for the line “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” which definitely captures 20th century war and progress. I was re-reading it, and felt that parts of it, in particular the first stanza, hit way too close to home in 2017.
Here is the full poem:
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?
January
should start a GoFundMe
to hire a marketing expert,
perhaps with social media prowess
alongside a slick-haired attorney
to complain that the phrase
“the dead of winter”
is wholly inaccurate,
its slander
lowering property values.
Each era
power-drenched leaders
think themselves
unique;
can the great
comprehend a future
where their deeds
just prove the value
of teaching
“Ozymandias” to
tenth grade English students?
Borders
ink lines on paper
at the drafter’s desk
the pen as potent
as the eraser
