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Independence Day, 2005

Turning and turning in a deepening gyre
The editor cannot hear the reporter
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The web-dimmed tide is unleashed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Democratic Coming is at hand.
Hardly are these words out
When a vast image of Spiritus Politico
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with a serpent tongue and face of man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow jowls, while all about it
Reel the shadows of indignant cawing ravens.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That two hundred twenty years of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by the Internet
And what rough media is this, its hour come round at last
Blogging towards Washington to be born.