The second coming

[jewel]

Seems appropriate at the moment.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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?