The Centre Cannot Hold

Left of right and right of left,

in the middle, there’s no rest.

Gauging newscasts spew despair.

Flounders flopping, hyping air.

•

The centre cannot hold,

into this darkest night.

Bombs strike the ground,

the trumpets sound.

Children sacrificed,

to claim their rites.

•

Evil to evil, grand upheavals,

spell doom for one and all.

Humanity is craven,

with apathetic gall.

•

Left of right, right of left,

in the middle there’s no rest.

Form up,

stand up,

be bold.

The centre cannot hold.

***

Authors Note - In this dark hour of the world, I was inspired by this poem by W.B. Yeats. Written in 1919 at the end of WWI while his wife fought off the Spanish flu.

The Second Coming

W.B. Yeats, 1919

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?

***