Know this sister and brother: gravity rules our lives.
It must be obeyed each step of the way, up ladders
and ramps, through all our days. Nature rules,
but begins with the award of life, our first prize.
Centripetal names another force, a law that keeps
us spinning through space without falling out of place
as we wait for the masters of laws lower than gravity
to grab the gavel and begin to make sense.
Centrifugal names the opposite force, a law that makes
things fly into space, which the center cannot hold. As said
by Yeats, an old world bard, the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Non sequitur, a thing so old it’s still dressed in Latin,
is not a natural, but a human law, so it may be ignored
at no greater cost than anyone decides to impose –
such as by wrinkling the brow, or a damning D plus.
Dave Read
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?
By William Butler Yeats
“The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War[4] and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland.” From wikipedia.