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: 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

___________________________

recently it feels as though things have fallen apart

and the center no longer holds

what was good is evil

and what was evil is good

what was prized, compassion and honesty

are now neglected, and what was despised

brutality and greed, are now exaluted

Does all that is "not Sacred" slouch toward us

waiting to dominate, to "win"

and what do we do, we citizens of Bethlehem?

do we "stand rooted and speechless while the pavement cracks to pieces and the sky falls down" (Louise Penny adapted)

or do we wait for another coming

of a better world,

a Kingdom where nothing exists that is not Sacred

a Kingdom of "heaven"

and do we, instead of standing

act

birthing through our acts of love, generosity and compassion,

that for which we wait?