THE MORNING CONSTITUTIONAL HAS POETRY

THE SECOND COMING

by William Butler Pleats

Turning and turning in the Belkening gyre
The Atlantic cannot hear the commissioner;
Things fall apart; the Coastal cannot hold;
Bobby Petrino 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 Virginia.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely ACC Media Days are at hand.
ACC Media Days! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Called only "Paul Johnson", while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant South Florida ibises.
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 Charlotte to play Duke?