The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

In this world we have made, with so many people grown so deeply disheartened, there is much to ponder in this ever-popular poem by William Butler Yeats. He wrote it in 1919, when violent echoes of the Great War, the Easter Rising, and the Russian Revolution still resounded and tormented the ears of humanity.

If that history seems too ancient and remote to be relatable, I point out that, at the time, my parents were eager minded ten-year-old students, coming sufficiently into their awareness of world events so as to share some of Yeats’ foreboding.

For nearly a hundred years, “The Second Coming” has resisted earnest attempts at definitive interpretation. Many have fallen into the simplistic trap of is obvious biblical cant.

As for me, I forego any desire to interpret it. However, apocalyptic themes notwithstanding, I find it a joy to read it, to recite it, to use it as reminder and means of reflection upon the human condition. I suspect I’m not alone in that joy.

 

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
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Juke Joint

 

“Juke Joint” by Janie McGee

 

 

stepping smooth across rocks and rye
drinking the wood grain from planks
soaked with jazz hunched and swaying
on stilts in the muddy red clay of Jim Crow
wringing blues from a shantytown sax
pearled with sharecropper calluses
moist with the heat of a Saturday night
every teardrop shaped note that escaped
the tin roof made magnolia tree blossoms
hang heavy with redolent sweating sweet
shame of their pink and white bystander guilt

 

 

(originally posted December 2013)

Players

 

Image from pinterest.com

 

 

Black-iron wood stove flared pungently warm
Checkerboard straddling an oak barrel rim
Players hunched upon fruit crates that creaked
Pipesmoke circled the older man’s head
Clear blue eyes in a white whiskered face
The young man kept shifting uncomfortably
Considering moves with a hesitant hand when
The door blew bang-open to wind-driven snow
And a frightening figure appeared with a rush
Fully filling the portal with storm-bundled hulk
Wet snow gusted across the sawdust-laid floor
He had panic about him and gasped for lost breath
Till his mouth gave a cry like a bear in a trap
Filling up the big room with deep guttural moans
It took a few moments to unroll his trouble
His boys had both fallen through hard millpond ice

In a single swift motion the aproned proprietor
Grabbed for his coat and vaulted the bartop
The players jumped up checkers flew through the air
They snatched coiled ropes and an oil-lamp down
From wall pegs along the shelved mercantile wall
The old man knocked the father back into the night
The young man flew by them on tall slender legs
Pumping his way through the knee-high new snow
He couldn’t make out where the breach had occurred
But heard desperate voices and thanked God for that
With a rope in his hand he moved out on the ice
Calling and crawling toward where they might be
The lantern light jounced as the rest of the party
Slogged through the dense drifts to the edge of the pond
Two immature ghosts were chased off on that night
But a bone-chill still shivers them sixty years on

Gray haired brothers now play that same barrelhead board
Keeping close by the heat of that same old black stove
Ready willing and able to jump at the sound of the door

 

 

(originally posted December 2013)

The Immortals

 

“The Favourite Poet” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

 

 

they destroy the intractable darkness
that would swallow ambition and settle
its pall over little-used library stacks

they set fires to minds, illuminate souls
with the hot gleam of wisdom we grasp
at with hungry-most hands of our eyes

human hearts put to flame with their
feather-quill torches, emotions reborn
to re-burn with aesthetic intensity

the words they embossed on the culture
still generate heat of enlightenment
glowing through rhythmic turns to forever

 

 

(originally posted December 2013)

Bohemian Scents

 

“Booksellers Along the Seine” by Edouard Leon Cortes

 

 

(The opening lines appeared in my earlier poem “Nosegays.” But they stuck in my mind and so I give them a fuller story here.)

 

 
cracked-leather mustiness
seeps from dry bindings
I rescued from tumbling
dust covered stacks
crowding bookseller stalls
hung from medieval quays
overlooking the Seine
from Rive Gauche where
sweet sleep is no proper
companion of night when
young poets old painters
and passionate lovers
perform their best work
in fin de siècle garrets
whose earthiness settles
in seams of stale smoke

revolution still sweats
in the mist stealing
over dry friable sills
caught in cracks of
dead candlewax clumps
lifeless flowers in
hammered tin vases
smell moldy beside
acrid turpentine cups
oily palettes of pigments
intended to breathe
life back into the colorless
stiffened thin stems
mean decades of meals
made of river fish
sautéed in garlic and wine
sour linens that hide
under beds with glazed
chamber pots masked by
dried sprigs of herbs
tacked onto footboards

journals of love stories
reeking with loss that
inspired sad scores of
unfinished novellas
discarded librettos
but poetry oh how much
poetry hangs in the
vapors of lampblack
from India inkpots and
long since dulled quills
that excite to a flare
nostrils savoring all
of the human condition
that tainted these attics
where once my new
purchased old books
lived their well-used
existence collecting
the heady aromas of life

 

 

(originally posted January 2014)

American Century

 

“In the Crowd” by Paulette Van Roekens

 

 

my parents lived the American Century
no time since the Renaissance so rich
with change full of progress and perils
America’s role in a cold unpredictable
world teemed with triumph and tragedy
stretched to the limits of human experience
far and beyond what their minds could imagine
they watched the repeated remaking
of all that composes the human condition
its gorgeous new virtuous waves of nobility
cresting a tidal implausible sequence with
grotesque new depths of an utter depravity
rising and troughing then rising and troughing
each phase reaching ever historical levels
agog and bewildered they nonetheless witnessed
the shadow of Wright Model B muslin wings
and the star-blink of Space Station Alpha
pushed and pulled they endured sounds
of battlefield agonies raised to the skies
above forests of green Argonne trees and bleak
alleyways twisting with intrigues of Kandahar
eager participants they fast became part of a
cultural prominence justly well storied and gloried
but not one to last and I thank divine time
that its wretched demise missed their eyes for they
so loved this home of their children the country
who nurtured the immigrant dreams that
sustained their proud peasant Italian-born hearts

 

(originally posted January 2014)

Lucky

 

Photo by Catherine MacBride

 

 

comes a time in a marriage
when a lucky few realize
their spouse knows them
better than anyone ever
could know them from inside
and outside and underneath
flesh and blood costumes
behind even purpose-built
images flattered by mirrors
the world holds in hand
knows them full in their
glory and gristle and bone
and in knowing them nonetheless
loves them beyond any love
they could ever in honesty
manage to feel for themselves
comes a time in a marriage
when that lucky few find
an exquisite contentment

 

(originally posted January 2014)

Borderland

 

Detail of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

 

 

finest monument in the land
Massachusetts fifty-fourth
volunteers under Robert Gould Shaw
first negro regiment forged
in the flames that flew from the
principled penstroke of Lincoln
distinguished in battle and
covered by glory immortalized in
bronze relief proudly marching
across poignant borderland
leaving behind profane chains
for a freedom graced future
what the sculptor never knew
was how unnecessarily wide
and besieged was that crossing
how painfully far lay that future

 

(original posted June 2013)

Organic Colors

 

“Watermelon” by Lutz Baar

 

 

the melons are finally in bloom

laden with slaking refreshment

in this overhot season of conflict

parching forbearance of citizens

green and red in sublime coalition

yield sweet fruit all thirsts can enjoy

while the blue and red give forth

with nothing but dry barren vines

 

(originally posted June 2013)

Leitmotif

 

Walt Whitman’s Cardboard Butterfly

 

(originally posted June 2013)

 

words female with contours and hollows
evoke elementary tensions when
paired within stanzas to masculine
edges and ridges in mise-en-scène
headiness giving descriptive verse
didactic powers of experiential and
unthinking sensory gratification

my mind can appreciate concepts
like these but pushing such ideas down
into my fingers and out through my pen
is a whole other kettle of lyrical fish
inspiration and intellect overlap some
but are largely autonomous qualities
true poets should feel more than think

….I think