The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats

[Scrivener7]

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?

[marble falls]

1. There are a few lines of that poem that ended up in other's hands. One of my favorites is ...

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays by Joan Didion that mainly describes her experiences in California during the 1960s. It was published on May 10, 1968, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.[1] It takes its title from the poem "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats.[2] The contents of this book are reprinted in Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (2006).
Collection's origins

According to Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, the book came about this way: "In the spring of 1967, Joan Didion [was ...] engaged to write a regular column for The Saturday Evening Post. [...] At some point, an editor suggested that she had the makings of a collection, so she stacked her columns with past articles she liked (a report from Hawaii, the best of some self-help columns she'd churned out while a junior editor at Vogue), set them in a canny order with a three-paragraph introduction, and sent them off. This was Slouching Towards Bethlehem."[3]

From WIKI

A very good read about the 60s California. Right up with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe.

[Scrivener7]

2. I loved that book! And it turned me on to the poem, which seems to describe today so perfectly.

I'm not much for poetry, but this blew me away.

[marble falls]

3. Sounds like we read some of the same stuff. I love good poetry.