Slouching towards Bethlehem: Another 911 anniversary...

 

                                                      —Rachel is weeping for her children

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And as for me, when I came from Padan, Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan in the way, when yet there was but a little way to come unto Ephrath: and I buried her there in the way of Ephrath; the same is Bethlehem. -- Genesis 48:7

But thou, Bethlehem, house of Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose exoduses [ἔξοδοι] have been from of old, from everlasting. -- Micah 5:2

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. 

. . .

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 
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again but now I know 
That fourteen 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? 

-- William Butler Yeats ("The Second Coming")