A little over 100 years ago, in the disillusioned aftermath of The Great War (now known as World War I), the Irish poet William Butler Yeats penned one of the most canonical and frequently quoted poems in the English language, “The Second Coming,” where he envisions, amid a world afflicted with “mere anarchy,” a monstrous shape emerging from the desert with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” The brief, 22-line poem closes chillingly with the killer couplet: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

Literature, according to Ezra Pound, another old white guy from the last century, “is news that stays news.” While Pound, with his fascist sympathies for Mussolini’s Italy in the Second World War and his bombastic authoritarian know-it-all didacticism, has not aged especially well, he nailed it with that insight, which Yeats so eloquently illustrates with his timelessly contemporary poem that feels more prophetic than ever.

The rough beast slouching into Washington the day after tomorrow for the second time, with his pitiless blank gaze of a television screen perennially tuned to Fox News, brings with him an apocalyptic promise to raze “the administrative state” and replace it with an ultimate-fighting free-for-all where billionaires compete for the spoils of unregulated capitalism.

As a member of the media and thus, according to the new president, an enemy of the people, I should have something to say about all this.

But sometimes the beast in the room takes up so much space that it’s redundant to acknowledge it, especially when everyone else is trying to describe every cubic centimeter of its elephantine anatomy. So unless I have something original to say, my New Year’s resolution is to write as little as possible about the second coming, and if I can avoid it, not even write the beast’s name.

But surely the next four years, give or take some unpredictable plot twists, will be a bad reality show that, like a natural disaster, will be horrifying but compelling, and impossible to ignore.

Even if they don’t impact us personally, the supreme leader’s promised policies will affect our quality of life by contaminating public space with grotesque events. It may not be my family being ripped apart and hauled off to deportation camps, but still I must live in a country that elected a president who promised to do this. I may not live adjacent to some plume of toxic emissions, but what goes up comes around and will eventually land close to home. To choose not to know what the rulers are doing — to the community, to the nation, to the planet — is an abdication of citizenship.

So I will be paying attention, even if I have no solutions and don’t wish to add to the ambient anxiety.

For historical perspective I will attempt to view what’s happening from 10,000 feet, as another stage of human evolution and the rise and fall of empires, of decadent civilizations, and probably not much worse than the dictatorships and ethnic cleansings and war crimes and corruptions of previous eras. Even my stable middle-class 1950s childhood in postwar prosperity was anomalous, and coexisted with injustices we are now (mostly) ashamed of.

But pleasure is also on my agenda. Simple joys and comforts like cooking good meals, listening to good music, reading and rereading great poems, seeing good movies, hanging with friends, working with skilled and creative colleagues — such forms of existential resistance remind me of my romantic youth when I believed in a future worth looking forward to.

Hard to imagine as it may be here at the edge of a perilous present, that could still be true.

Stephen Kessler’s “Application to Be the Inaugural Poet” can be found at Poetry Flash, https://www.poetryflash.org/poems/?p=KESSLER-Application_to_Be_the_Inaugural_Poet. His column appears on Saturdays.