Things Fall Apart – Balmy Alley, Mission District, San Francisco, California

This mural painted in 2004 by Janet Braun-Reinitz provides an artist’s commentary of the AIDS epidemic. It takes it name from a line from the poem "The Second Coming" written in 1919 by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

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.