Category Archives: poetry

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

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Seems appropriate right now.

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, 1919

The Last Neanderthal’s Love Song

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O ancestors! Please hear my cry.
I'm eighteen summers old.
I need a wife, but evolution's
Left me in the cold.

I'm the last Neanderthal.
I have some woman friends—
Nice-looking, others tell me—but
They're Homo sapiens.

I'd like to meet a girl like Mom
With a rich potato form.
These sapiens are willowy;
They don't look very warm.

A woman looks her best, I think,
With low, protruding brow,
But the female forehead fashion
Is high and flat right now.

A lady's lower jaw should sink
Delicately in.
Beneath their lips, these girls have got
A pointy, prickly "chin."

A sideways egg's the pretty shape
That suits a female skull.
But modern girls have heads as round
As the moon does when it's full.

Alas, O ancestors! Alas,
Our race will not survive.
I'll never wed, and I'm the last
Neanderthal alive.

via www.steamthing.com

found this over at the Dish. It begs to be set to an Arthur Sullivan score.

we are more

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Easily one of my favourite segments from last night's opening ceremony was Shane Koyczan's poem, we are more.  Found a YouTube of him a few years ago.


And the text:

“We Are More” by Shane Koyczan

When defining Canada
you might list some statistics
you might mention our tallest building
or biggest lake
you might shake a tree in the fall
and call a red leaf Canada
you might rattle off some celebrities
might mention Buffy Sainte-Marie
might even mention the fact that we’ve got a few
Barenaked Ladies
or that we made these crazy things
like zippers
electric cars
and washing machines
when defining Canada
it seems the world’s anthem has been
” been there done that”
and maybe that’s where we used to be at
it’s true
we’ve done and we’ve been
we’ve seen
all the great themes get swallowed up by the machine
and turned into theme parks
but when defining Canada
don’t forget to mention that we have set sparks

we are not just fishing stories
about the one that got away
we do more than sit around and say “eh?”
and yes

we are the home of the Rocket and the Great One
who inspired little number nines
and little number ninety-nines
but we’re more than just hockey and fishing lines
off of the rocky coast of the Maritimes
and some say what defines us
is something as simple as please and thank you
and as for you’re welcome
well we say that too
but we are more
than genteel or civilized
we are an idea in the process
of being realized
we are young
we are cultures strung together
then woven into a tapestry
and the design
is what makes us more
than the sum total of our history
we are an experiment going right for a change
with influences that range from a to zed
and yes we say zed instead of zee
we are the colours of Chinatown and the coffee of Little Italy
we dream so big that there are those
who would call our ambition an industry
because we are more than sticky maple syrup and clean snow
we do more than grow wheat and brew beer
we are vineyards of good year after good year
we reforest what we clear
because we believe in generations beyond our own
knowing now that so many of us
have grown past what used to be
we can stand here today

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