Too Late for Politics, Time for Poetry

We’re on the clock now, not the calendar--70 or so hours to learn what kind of country we have for the foreseeable future.

The America of Wednesday morning on is already out there, waiting to reveal itself, and nothing will change it, not Mitt Romney flag-waving, Joe Biden jokes about turning back the clock or legal chicanery in swing states.

The future will sweep away the psychic debris of political storms that have raged for almost two years, leaving reason and sanity in its wake. The only comfort in these final hours may be poetry.

What comes to mind is William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” written 90 years ago in post-World War I dread:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Humanity made it through a Great Depression and a Second World War after that. One way or another, it will again.

Update: On the last day before, candidates are out with rock bands and their own brand of poetry, spinning  weird images for glassy-eyed voters in swing states, hoping they will go to the polls still in a daze.

Yeats’ poem ends with a prophetic question:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?