troubles my sight

= Govtrack.us -- a site where a person can follow proposed bills in Congress


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"The Second Coming"
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?


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(painting, Keck Fine Art Publishing)


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