Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Studied Yeats' The Second Coming in high school (ACS, Greece, 1995-1998). 

Needless to say it went over my head but the powerful language , of course, stays with you. This whole stanza got etched in my memory: 

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.

So, I was moved to read these words again in this piece in the Lit Hub and, what can I say, this poem makes sense. The writer poignantly explains this poem in the 'light' of the Genocide in Gaza. 

Urge you to read this piece. These are some quotes: 

Gaza, in this ongoing catastrophe, cannot be regarded as a distant territory. It has become the trembling fulcrum upon which the gyre of moral collapse turns.

We now dwell entirely inside the gyre of discord, spinning at terrifying velocity, no longer orbiting a center—because the center no longer holds. Its gravity has collapsed beneath the weight of repetition and moral fatigue. And Gaza, stripped bare of illusion, stands at the raw core of that collapse. It is not a rupture from history’s pattern; it is the place where the pattern lays itself bare.

The falcon no longer hears the falconer. The voice that once steadied its wings has gone silent beneath the rubble. The skies above Gaza are filled with motion, yet movement here offers no direction. Flight remains, but its meaning has inverted. What once carried the promise of return now signals erasure. Surveillance, targeting, disappearance—these are the new verbs of air. In this place, the gyre is no longer allegory. It is the shape of days. It is the rhythm of hunger and silence. It is the line that turns and turns and never finds rest.

Hunger now governs time. It becomes the unrelenting measure by which each hour is known. It rewires the body’s understanding of itself, distorting perception, dulling memory, blurring the boundary between emotion and need. When it arrives, it does not knock or whisper—it dismantles.  

In the streets, I see children crouched low to the ground, scraping flour from the dirt. They move slowly, with concentration, as if they are memorizing each grain. Their hands sift dust from food without complaint. There are no cries. No dramatics. Only the steady labor of survival. Hunger has become a shared grammar, a collective motion passed silently from child to child, from hand to mouth. The world once responded to these images with shock. Now it turns away. People have stopped flinching.

I cannot explain to the outside world how ordinary things—the right to desire, to imagine, to plan—no longer arrive to us. The mundane gifts of modernity, so freely available elsewhere, are withheld here with cosmic indifference. We are dizzy, drained, barely human, clinging to the frayed edges of dignity, not because we were born weak, but because we are being emptied by design. 

I did not understand then how suffering repeats itself. It circles back with greater precision each time, more efficient, more stripped of illusion. What we call survival is only another form of dying, a prolonged unraveling of body and thought. The gyre, as Yeats wrote, turns again. It tightens around us with the rhythm of a prophecy we no longer need to interpret.

That is Gaza. It is a sustained dismantling of the soul. We do not vanish all at once. We fall in stages, hunger, disillusionment, dispossession, numbness. And still, we write. Still, we speak. Because to name this is to resist its totality.

What Yeats foresaw as the Second Coming was never a promise of salvation. It was revelation—a monstrous birth in the dust, a moment when history folds in on itself and delivers not progress, but reckoning. Gaza is that reckoning. Here, the myths that once sustained the imagination of modern civilization—human rights, international law, moral values—shatter under the weight of their own contradictions. Their language fails to touch the ground. Their principles are too delicate to survive impact. They collapse where the bomb lands, where the children fall.

Yeats’s spirals, once dismissed as the wild diagrams of a mystic, now settle over this place like soot. What once looked like esoteric symbols now resemble maps drawn too early. His falcon still circles, but the sky above Gaza offers no axis, no return path, no center to descend toward, only a deepening orbit around an absence no language can fill.