What Rough Beast Slouches Towards Bethlehem?
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: 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
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
3 comments:
The photo of the peregrine shows a scarred tissue and likely a frozen carpal wing injury from a fracture that cannot be fully extended. A common collision injury for all birds of prey. More often the left rather than the right wing is injured when birds are crossing in front of traffic from the right shoulder of the road.
Saw the broken edge, but did not piece it together as a broken bird. Live and learn! THANKS!
Were this bird wild (or were it to be lost), what would its chances be?
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