I write — not of one party or another, not of one candidate or another — not of one administration or another.  I write of a dream I was taught in elementary school.

I believed the lady in harbor and her invitation of love, succor, and welcome.  Growing up in the moment that we recognized how far short of the lady’s words we had fallen, I gave myself, heart and soul to their fulfillment.

Christmas time nearly here, it forms an intersection in history.  I think of poetry (another poem will follow) and wish to call up the poets to our aid.  Not the poets of adolescent angst nor of florid love — but the bards, the poets who serve the divine — by whatever name that divine is called.  They sing of the Deep — the place where the holy lives — before time — the dark inside the spark of great radiance (big bang) — the breath before that exhalation out of which all life exploded into becoming (evolution).

My heart longs for the poetry of birth and hope — and, I swear, that the only way to go forward is by serving that spirit — and now I feel, shambling up behind me, the voices of poets who cry out warnings for the spirit.

THE SECOND COMING W.B. Yeats

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

Let us be stronger than rough beasts.

And dedicated to a muscular love,

let us not slouch but stand and move,

dedicated to the service of life, love, and justice.