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The Reverend Billy Choir in La Plaza do The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

Yesterday, Sunday, July 9, 2017 folks gathered at La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez at 9th Street and Avenue C in NYC to say goodbye to the weeping willow tree that was planted by Latino youths in the mid-seventies when they decided to change a garbage strewn vacant lot into a community park. That was the beginning, that was the spark the continues offering light to this very day. Sadly, the Parks Department has determined that the willow is suffering from inner rot and is in danger of falling. For safety’s sake it must come down. Reverend Billy and his Choir officiated this celebratory wake, and the Vimeo begins as Reverend Billy ends his sermon and the Choir begins to sing The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats, a timely poem to sing if there ever was one. The tree has given shade and memories to many. Perhaps a hawthorn will be planted in its place or another willow from one of its own branches. Earthelujah! La Plaza remains.


http://laplazacultural.com


http://www.revbilly.com


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: 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?


-2


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