Things Fall Apart

Well, I'm still out of commission. My dad just came by with Theraflu and ice cream, which is all my body wants to consume right now.

The email comes trickling into this machine and it's particularly racety today. The whole world has become uncomfortably racety in the past year, and even if it's a good thing, it's exhausting. However, on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's assassination, I think it's worth it to uncover one of my favorite Yeats pieces. (Say that with me: Yeats pieces. Yeats pieces. Yeats pieces.)

It's not just my favorite. Everyone likes this shit. Why? Because not only does it uncover the kind of hopelessness that probably follows after the death of someone who dedicated his life to justice (regardless of his personal foibles), but a very simple phrase in it is used in two pieces that I consider to be incredibly important to my racial understanding. From Ireland to Nigeria to Philly. Take that.

Ooh, and it's so sexy and dark. Do I post this every year? If I don't, I should.

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: 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?

God, that's just fucking gorgeous.