The Second Coming, 2024

After William Butler Yeats
 
Spinning and dancing in a flame-licked gyre
The phoenix need not court this massacre;
Life falls apart; the biosphere curls and folds;
hydrocarbons stoke a heat-struck world,
The ice-bled tide is unloosed, and everywhere
The illusions of humanity are drowned;
The best rue their predictions, while the worst
Admonish greed and inequality.

Surely some resolution is at hand;
Surely geo-engineering is at hand.
Geo-engineering! Hardly is that term out
When a vast image of a white elephant
Troubles my sight: somewhere in a spreading desert
A shape with pinched body and a tusk-riven head,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is dragging wasted thighs, while all about it
Ashes leap to form the immortal firebird.
Harsh rainfall clouds confound; for now I know
That twenty selfish centuries weep
Vexed to nightmare by a smoking chimney,
And a consumptive feast: their issue, come at last,
Reels for some Eden as it burns.