Not Yet Anarchy

Photo by Наталия Котович from Pexels


Like our land had a spell over it
And we were caught in the middle.
Like there’s so much more to say
Maybe I’ll say it later
What silver linings some may mine from Covid-19.
Like birds. Talking. And less traffic.

No road through the heart is free from danger.
Like holding off loss and heartache like a stranger.
Like seeing the best minds of a generation destroyed by the death of truth.

The price you pay for being warm is cold.
The price you pay for being young is old.
The price you pay for being live is dying.
The price you pay for being glad is crying.

I think the occasional thorn bite is worth the rose.
Like tough love is the half-life of love.

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?”

“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

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