714 Days - Heading Toward Rosh Hashana

 

I took this photo of the squills which herald the coming of Autumn.  They arise on every hill and in every valley and on every patch of land.  It is the time of the bird migration,  as millions of different species make their way to Africa. Nature continues undeterred, despite the horrors caused by humans. We are heading toward Rosh Hashana - The New Year, which begins on the evening of September 22nd this year. The beginning of the days of awe, between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kipur.  A time of repentance, of introspection, of prayer.  And here,  a continued time of war, war, and more war. The hostages are not back - the soldiers fight and are killed. The inhabitants of Gaza either remain in their battered city, or pay large sums of money to leave - where do they go?  As a nation we end another year of war, and move into the next year, there is no light, no hope. Despair. Grief. Anger. What a way to begin a new year.

700 DAYS

 700 DAYS. The incredulous is credulous.  The not possible is possible.  The unbelievable is believable. 

                                                         

                                                    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, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Haradly 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?

Written by Yeats in 1919 for another country, another land.  How prophetic for our sorry state as things fall apart.  How exact the words are for our times.  How very tragic.