WB YEATS AND THE "ARAB SPRING"

THIS 1919 POEM BY YEAST SEEMS MORE PROPHETIC THAN EVER - ESPECIALLY AFTER THIS YEAR'S SO-CALLED "ARAB SPRING" AND AFTER TODAYS' EVENTS IN CAIRO, WHERE THUGS STORMED THE ISRAELI EMBASSY AS SOLDIERS STOOD AND WATCHED.

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?

IT SEEMS CERTAIN THAT TURKEY WILL SOON ATTEMPT TO PROVOKE A WAR WITH ISRAEL - EITHER OVER GAZA OR MEDITERRANEAN GAS.

HAMAS AND HIZBALLAH WOULD CERTAINLY JOIN IN, SO WOULD ASSAD AND IRAN AND LIBYA.

WHICH WOULD MAKE EZEKIEL EVEN MORE ACCURATE THAN YEATS.

SIGH.