W. B. Yeats Warned Us...

By Vickilane


Turning and turning in the widening gyre   The falcon cannot hear the falconer;  Things fall apart; the center 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?