Meditations in Time of Civil War: The Stare's Nest at My Window



This is an old quote of the day, from a couple of years ago, which I have moved from my old page.
In Richard Powers' recent novel Plowing the Dark, the workers on a big virtual reality project are gathered at a bar watching the news: the Soviet Union crumbling, Yugoslavia balkanizing, Iraq occupying Kuwait,... One of them recalls the following bit of poetry and recites: in a moment not unlike the present...

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.



We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed or a house burned.

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.



A barricade of stone or of wood

Some fourteen days of civil war

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty nest of the stare.



We have fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

- William Butler Yeats