thoughts

Unfortunately, it seems we don't learn from the mistakes of the past. Although they say that 'history never repeats,' 'The Second Coming' by A.B Yates seems as applicable to world politics today, as it was when he wrote it 1921.

'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?

For some light hearted relief, my Mum used to read this to me when I was little. It use to scare me, especially because we lived adjacent to a park.

I have also been a fan of Lewis Carroll, especially the jabberwocky. (I think that scared me too.)