When Darkness Wants To Bring Annihilation To Everything Poem by Gert Strydom

(after William Butler Yeats)

The world is in pieces, it falls apart,
when darkness wants to bring annihilation,
while the falcon circles above the falconer
and nobody is spared from this evil.
For God's return the earth is ready:
the Russians do distort all principles
and rape and murder is insignificant,
while God does protect His children from obliteration,
and the falcon flies higher in its circles,
as if it will not land on the arm of its owner.
Nuclear-arms are jerked out to threaten,
the wind keeps blowing around a deadly pestilence,
a theatre and apartments burn to the ground
and every leader is inclined to lies and chaos.

[Reference: 'The second coming' by William Butler Yeats.

I am quoting: 'The second coming' by William Butler Yeats


The Second Coming" by WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

"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? "]
© Gert Strydom