Poetry

Growing up, outside of Shel Silverstein, I was never a big fan of poetry. It didn't truly speak to me until my senior of high school. Even then it was more about vocabulary and structure than rhythm or depth.

I'm not sure what has changed, but over the last couple of years, I can feel a poem more.

This lead to my discovery of the amazing podcast, The Daily Poem - one poem a day, usually read twice, sometimes seasonal, with a bit of analysis and discussion, all in less than ten minutes. Even my son will ask for the poem podcast.

So far (out of about 30 or so I've listened to), my biggest discovery is Yeats' "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: 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?

You can hear the depression evoked of the era of World War One, of an Ireland facing its bloody struggle for independence, of the dawn of a new era of horrific genocide.

The last line of the first stanza is what most spoke to me - in an era where our politics and Church leadership seem to shrink from the Truth and from courage; where social justice mobs attack others for speech and privilege crimes with a voracious intensity; what better line to describe the social media era?