In my Father´s Garden

In my Father´s Garden

Composed and published by Jean-Louis Mondon 

As the golden dawn was announcing  a new day

My Heavenly Father, the Master Gardener

Woke me up from the morning mist

And invited me for a light walk

Let´s go down to my Garden, he said

Together we will stroll where the air exhales

His sweet subtle calming fragrance

Splashing with resplendent light

The foot paths in diaphanous tones

Together in sweet communion

We will walk rejoicing on this earth

Your blessed home, granted to you

My good and beautiful creation

There I will show you a most exquisite flower

One that grows and blooms

Turning towards the sun, matchless love

Of my beloved Son, Jesus your Lord

The soft soothing warmth of the rays

Emanating from His eyes filled with goodness

Beckons the poor in spirit and humble at heart,

Touching and healing even the most broken

The fragile beauty of its essence

Never fades into forgetfulness

But dying to self will be transformed

Into good and lasting fruit

For the flowing spring of the water of life

That feeds it never, ever runs dry.

THE SECOND COMING

Note from the blogger: I found this poem in the Prologue page of an ebook I ordered today titled: Slouching towards Gomorrah" by Robert Bork.
I found it very "à propos".

 William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
     

    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?

---

The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermath
of the first World War. The above version of the poem is
as it was published in the edition of Michael Robartes and
the Dancer dated 1920 (there are numerous other
versions of the poem). The preface and notes in the book
contain some philosphy attributed to Robartes. This printing of the poem has a page break between lines 17 and 18 making the stanza division unclear.

Following the two most similar drafts given in the Parkinson and
Brannen edited edition of the manuscripts, I have put a
stanza break there. (Interestingly, both of those drafts
have thirty centuries instead of twenty.) The earlier drafts
also have references to the French and Irish Revolutions
as well as to Germany and Russia.

Several of the lines in the version above differ from those
found in subsequent versions. In listing it as one of the
hundred most anthologized poems in the English
language, the text given by Harmon (1998) has changes
including: line 13 (": somewhere in sands of the desert"),
line 17 ("Reel" instead of "Wind"), and no break
between the second and third stanza.

Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Chruchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala Press, 1920. (as found in the photo-lithography edition printed Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970.) Yeats, William Butler. "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.