DAY 26

Saw a magnificent red tailed hawk circle around and then land on a powerline. As I waited for him to take off again, the first two lines of Yeats' The Second Coming kept running through my head.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer*

When I looked up red tailed hawks I discovered that the average wing span is 48". It's simultaneously thrilling and chilling to watch something that large soar overhead.


[*Here's the rest in case you hate to have half of
something stuck in your head the way I do]


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?