Jericho Rez

In the beginning, things were really great. All was peaceful and quiet. Slowly but surely, in our foolishness, we added new sounds to the silence. Over thousands of years, this silence grew into a maddening din. White Noise. Jericho Rez. What has happened to the days, when we were eager to listen and slow to speak? Those days seem far away, but we can begin to change - one person at time.

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

This poem, written in the days before WII by William Butler Yeats gave me chills when I read it for the first time 30 years ago. And today, it seems like an appropriate post for today's Jericho Rez musings. (Yes, you are correct, Easter 1916 is another Yeats masterpiece to consider).

The Second Coming

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?