This song is on the theme of the second coming, but is very much a proclamation of social justice and would work in Advent. It is from Gather 3rd edition and the text is by Rory Cooney, based on passages from Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Joel. The tune is MORNING TRUMPET by B.F. White. It was originally for the Millennium but with another jubilee coming it might be a song ready for reuse. The “weary world is trudging toward the year of jubilee” suggests he had been reading Yeats.
The sheet music can be purchased at GIA, where the text is in their preview.
The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
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: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?