with Yeats
What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of the balance, the dip of the scale, and so date the coming of that something? W.B Yeats, A Vision
It didn’t take long for the magpies to come back.
They are not falcons. I call them in with seedy fat.
We live on the widening gyre of justice now,
just outside the narrowing corkscrew tongue of raw power
shrinking like an old god’s cock after 2,000 years,
his self-made cage rattled with raging whimpered tears.
see W. B. Yeats and the Cycles of History for a discussion of the gyre of his famous poem, “The Second Coming.”
