Turning and turning in the cerebral gyre
The brainworm now eats away the murderer
Plans fall apart, Wall Street starts losing hold
Bankers find bubbles bursting all over the world,
The stock market profits are at stake, and everywhere
The pretence of legality crumbles away;
The Exceptional Empire falters, while Europe's flatulent West
Are filled with a fearful schizophreny.
Surely some rescue is at hand;
Surely some Righteous War is being planned.
Some Righteous War! Hardly does Wall Street babble out its demand
When a masked face out of Wahhabi land
Troubles the oil-owning world: amid a waste of desert sand;
A raised gun,a black flag and the chopped head of a man,
Under a humanitarian intervention drone flying past the sun,
Are charging towards secular governments, while in the West
Screech minions of the media demanding war.
The cruise missiles drop again, and now you know
That the Warstate nestles deep
And Peace is hostage to a proxy battle:
And what rough beast, its eight years come round at last,
Slouches towards Warshington to be sworn?
[Updated and modernised version of WB Yeats' The Second Coming]
The brainworm now eats away the murderer
Plans fall apart, Wall Street starts losing hold
Bankers find bubbles bursting all over the world,
The stock market profits are at stake, and everywhere
The pretence of legality crumbles away;
The Exceptional Empire falters, while Europe's flatulent West
Are filled with a fearful schizophreny.
Surely some rescue is at hand;
Surely some Righteous War is being planned.
Some Righteous War! Hardly does Wall Street babble out its demand
When a masked face out of Wahhabi land
Troubles the oil-owning world: amid a waste of desert sand;
A raised gun,a black flag and the chopped head of a man,
Under a humanitarian intervention drone flying past the sun,
Are charging towards secular governments, while in the West
Screech minions of the media demanding war.
The cruise missiles drop again, and now you know
That the Warstate nestles deep
And Peace is hostage to a proxy battle:
And what rough beast, its eight years come round at last,
Slouches towards Warshington to be sworn?
[Updated and modernised version of WB Yeats' The Second Coming]
We are in for hard times. The peoples of the world tremble in fear.
ReplyDeleteGreat poem.
ReplyDeleteMichaelWme
One irritation is that a LOT of writers have no idea what the word 'Wahhabi' means. The Puritanical sect of Sunni Islam is called Salafi, meaning those who want to go back to the days when a grandchild of someone who had seen the Prophet (PBUH) was still alive. They believe in the death penalty for blasphemy, adulteresses, and apostates. There should be laws that require that women must be covered by an abaya and sheila at all times. Better, women should remain in purdah. Or harem. Or seraglio (three words for the same concept).
ReplyDeleteThere are three Salafi sub-sects. Al-Wahhab wrote that the Caliphate lost all legitimacy in the 13th (Christian) century, and the leadership of all Islam passed to the Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques, now the King of Saudi Arabia who rules by Divine Right and is guided by All_h so he cannot err. The King has said the al-Wahhab is the best Islamic scholar of all time, and since he cannot err, that proves al-Wahhab was right when he said the King cannot err.
A second sect believe the King is corrupt and a pure Caliphate must be reinstated (but that sect is subdivided into many, many branches, each of which claims to know the only true Caliph).
The third sect is the Brotherhood, a more-or-less Democratic Salafi sect, although the Brotherhood gets to decide who gets to vote and who gets to run, but the will of the voters chooses the nation's (maybe all of Islam's) sovereign.
The three subsects hate each other.
MichaelWme