stormy weather

Waking to the sight of blue sky and broken clouds, hot and humid again, sitting with a coffee watching scenes of America burning, once again. The rhyme of history, the obscenities of the powerful played out, once again, on the public stage.

“Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.” 
Thomas Paine. ( The American Crisis Vol 1: 1776)

Today's thunderstorm arriving later than forecast, swarming across the afternoon distance, low thunders and vague lightnings to the north east, swallowing the city centre and, then, less than an hour later gone.

Later another whisky sodden chat, they've now got the freedom to sit in someone else's garden, glad that they live in Scotland as they watch, with sorrow and dismay, the politics of chaos taking place south of the border. A sense that perceptions are changing, that the connection to Westminster is fraying further with each lie and broken promise issuing from de Piffle Paffle and his gang of inepts..

Sometimes it feels that all that you have to say has been said before...


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?

W.B. Yeats (January 1919)