Listening to the news with Yeats after the Circus Fire

Rockaway, Nov 7th, 2024

Yeats, calling out from the grave, through a battered copy of ‘Soundings’, a memory scratching its way to the surface,  1990 something and teenage me wondering “Why do I have to learn this?”

A half a life and half a world away, driving home from Big City Folk Song Club, listening to the news, and it comes back, that line, “the centre cannot hold” and then rest , and ah yeah, yeah, that’s why…

“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.”

 

https://poets.org/poem/second-coming

 

A man on the boardwalk walking his dog, I asked him only how he was, he said he hoped cholesterol might save the planet. Very good.

Another man cycled by in a ‘Trump Revenge Tour’ T shirt. I didn’t ask him how he was. Revenge is exhausting, he will wear himself out.

I saw good friends, blue skies and pink clouds and I heard the laughter of children today too. I thought of Bobby Sands, ‘Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.’