Prayers
photo made in the Cathedral in Catarina, Nicaragua – Dec. 8, 2011.

I have started a new blog on my portfolio website, which is http://brucetoombs.ca.  This site is mirrored there more or less (I have to deliberately import), but I’m also writing different things there.

[ edit: I am no longer blogging at brucetoombs.ca. I have moved everything here. ]

Here is the latest post from that site, put up a couple of days ago, about the Newtown massacre.

– B

I lack words to describe how I am feeling about the Newtown massacre, in which 20 little children were murdered in their classroom. So in their memory I am offering an image and a poem, which William Butler Yeats published in 1919. It expresses as well as anyone every could the horror I feel.

   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: 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?

(source: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html)