The Second Coming
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Muzaffer Tuncer; Inziva (Basilica Cistern, Istanbul)
“Mirroring a belated retreat, this work symbolizes modern man’s position in a possible post-apocalyptic world. The resources of the world being destroyed, and the destruction that is taking place is growing like a black hole that feeds as it destroys. Fragile human beings, who have nothing left to do, know that they have ended their own active history and are moving forward with the awareness that speculative fictions have come true.”
The Second Coming
William Butler 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 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?
“Lies My Gov't Told Me: And the Better Future Coming” Now available on Amazon (hard copy to be shipped Dec 6, 2022)
The overcomer is in the Christ of God alone.
Always chilling. Always disturbing. Yet it’s a cherished favorite. Perhaps because we know it so eloquently describes the horrors we have wrought upon ourselves. Thank you once again for your unique view of the world...blessings and all good things as another Thanksgiving draws to a close.