Blinded by the Setting Sun

I found myself having to "go to the Mall" yesterday.  (There is only one Apple store within 100 miles, my phone needed a battery, which I am not "allowed" to replace and my "Apple Care Plan" had expired after two years.) Subsequently, there I was on the stretch of "Mall Road".  Stores to the left and right, new store construction happening at an ant's pace, condos smack dab in the middle of the stores, bumper to bumper traffic of over-sized vehicles containing phone wielding people having sex with their devices, all eyes only straining forward or lapwards, at least someone had the foresight to build a hotel in the Mall, just in case. 

Just in case.

Mysteriously (or not), as I was going the other direction on "Mall Road", heading home, a poem I had not thought of in a million years started playing in my head.  Why?  Why this poem?  Did I experience a moment of clarity?  Or just a blip in my aging memory (is the Applegate Care Plan nearing expiration)? 

You tell me.

The poem:

       THE SECOND COMING

    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.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    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
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    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 Bethlehem to be born?

    - Willam Butler Yeats, 1919