I am invited to read some poetry at a community gathering tomorrow evening.  It is an honor to be asked to join others for sharing poetry and prose in a public place.  Words crafted and offered up to celebrate the joy and tragedy of our experience create a sacred space.

I plan to read this poem by W. B Yeats.  The lines of the poem have touched me deeply since my first reading many years ago.  The poem opens with the horror of a fundamental disconnect between the human presence and our engagement with Nature.  The image is of a raptor that is unable to return to it’s trainer, — profound disorientation is the point.

I have to read this poem because I think that we have entered a maelstrom of chaotic social relations, disruption in our relations with other nations.  The worst prospect is a drumbeat of weather driven disasters that pound our coastal cities, and the fires due to extended drought conditions in other parts of the country.  As far as I can tell “the center cannot hold.”

In a media fog where lies are indistinguishable from truth, and unabashed will-to-power is becoming more and more the norm — anarchy is loosed upon our world.  The epistemic confusion, the denial of reason contaminates all political discourse which plays to the strength of the so-called conservative minded folk.  As a matter of fact they do not intend to conserve anything; only to express infinite rage at being victims sacrificed to a system which they do not understand.  The scapegoats are those traitorous Clintons, or the horde of brown people invading our southern border.

If you are familiar with New Testament metaphor you will know that “The Second Coming” stands for divine intervention that imposes universal justice, and straightens out our “f____d up” world.  Instead of a supernatural solution for our intractable human failures, what do we get?

We get a hybrid man-beast who has no principles, none of the usual human sense of propriety, of behavioral limit.  This one is soulless, devoid of empathy.  He is the antithesis to the babe-in-the-manger, the one whose integrity as an adult meant that in the calculus of empire, his murder was just “business as usual.”  We have our rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

That is why this poem must be read tomorrow evening.

The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats- 1865-1939

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?