I
Turning and turning in the low grey air
above the Liffey, where the mist has drowned
the streetlamps to a rumour and the glass
has stalled all morning at its seventeen,
I watch the falcon of the world wheel wide,
and wider, till the falconer's thin cry
is nothing to it now. The centre slips.
The seas that were the throat of all our trade,
the narrow water men call Hormuz, close
like a hand upon the windpipe of the age,
and in the ports whose names I cannot say,
Bandar Abbas, Chabahar, the fire comes down
from engines in the dark, and the dark answers.
So the great wheel that carried Babylon
and Rome and every gaudy empire round
comes shuddering to the station of the beast.
II
I have seen fire before. I saw it take
the General Post Office in its year,
and thought I understood the taste of ash.
But now the whole south burns: in Spanish hills
a dozen dead, and more than twenty lost,
walkers from Britain, Belgium, gone to smoke
on a hillside they had come to for its light.
And where the fire will not go, the water will –
in China a second storm within a week
drives out a million from the drowning coast,
and under Venezuela the ground itself
has opened on four thousand, and again
four thousand, till the counting is a prayer
no rosary was ever long enough to hold.
Even the green heart of the world grows thin:
in the great forest a third part of the herbs
the old tribes gathered for their wounds and bread
withers, the doctors of the leaf struck dumb.
This is the blood-dimmed tide. It has no shore.
III
And yet – and here the vision turns to mock me –
the crowd is roaring. In a Miami bowl
of light the young men chase a rolling moon
of stitched white leather, and a boy called Bellingham
strikes twice in the drawn-out extra dark,
and England climbs, and Norway grieves its luck,
and Argentina after all its wars
of ninety minutes comes up through the ten
to stand among the last. The crowd is glad.
The crowd is always glad. I do not scorn it.
I too have loved a hero and a green field,
have felt the terrible sweet innocence
of ceremony rise up in a throat.
But O the thing that troubles me is this:
that men can lift a stadium of turf
and sell it off in squares for gold, like relics,
and price a dead king's bones, a lizard-king
sixty-seven million summers in the stone,
at thirty million of our little dollars,
while the live children of a Nigerian dawn
are ransomed back from bandits one by one,
and a reporter waits upon a summons
for saying that the emperor's new plane
will not turn back the missile aimed at it.
The best sit quiet. The worst have all the passion.
IV
Somewhere the shape moves. I have always known it –
lion-bodied, with the pitiless slow gaze
of a sun that does not love the things it lights.
It does not hurry. It has all the clock.
The mist lies on the Liffey. Seventeen
degrees, and grey, and Ireland keeps its counsel,
half in the Anglo world and half against it,
watching the falcon that will not come down.
What rough thing, its long hour come round at last,
stirs in the ports, the fires, the roaring stands,
and turns its heavy head toward the light
to ask us, in a voice we half-remember:
was it for this the ceremony of the years?
The gyre is at its widest. Hush. It hears you.