How could Yeats have known
The second coming
Eighty-five plus years
Down that distant road?
How could Eliot have seen
The waste land
Just a ways ahead
Around that twisted bend?
What prophet seeded
The words they wrote?
The message of their verses?
What oracle prompted
The way they spoke?
What shifting phantom
Touched their sleep with curses?
The meanings
Of their time
Between
The letters
Of their rhyme
Stood the truth
Of a hoary beast
Waiting patiently
To be unleashed
Upon sad Jerusalem