I just got so jazzed about the solar eclipse happening today that I had to throw together a quick poem about it. A very poetic/writerly part of my brain loves contemplating and explaining something that can only be experience indirectly, via filters or pinhole cameras. You can’t look right at the thing, so everything becomes a sort of metaphor or allusion to the real the thing. everyone is forced to become a poet or artist for this one experience.
Solar Eclipse, Shadows April 4th 2024
My friends, the evening dusk and shadows
come early today, and from an odd angle,
a near-noon second story window, rather than
their typical route, the western horizon, a wide open door.
Still, though, they are welcome. I rise,
set my work aside to greet them,
stepping into an estranged April afternoon.
Without a means to meet the sun’s strange glare
I turned instead to the shadows, shivering for me
on the pavement, with smiles holding secrets.
Their finer details, pine needles, small branches, all feathered,
whispering on and on, suggestions of the eclipse’s exact curve
refracted and retold in every bush’s shade.
I join my friends, stretch out and mesh my fingers,
to see my shadowed palms hold half a dozen eclipses.
I take my handful of odd darkness, sun and moon
on a short walk, until they fade away
to the returning normalcy of day.
That happiness lingers, from the eclipse’s kiss
on my shadowed palms, enacting that poet’s trick
of telling a more beautiful truth by not looking
right at the thing, but what it casts.
MaddWierd Poetry 