Speaking of eclipses … My poem on the Great American Eclipse of 2017

This morning, April 8th, I got to view a partial eclipse of the sun here in Northern California. It’s a fascinating phenomenon that provides a brief but welcome respite from divisive political sparring and other controversial topics, like football.

The last solar eclipse I watched was in August of 2017, aka the Great American Eclipse, since, unlike today’s, that total eclipse was visible across our country, from sea to shining sea.

I wrote a poem on that occasion that I’ll share with you now.

Solar Eclipse August 21, 2017

Do not convict the moon,
that every hundred years
forgets itself,
blunders into the spotlight,
plunging us in darkness.
The moon, I say, is innocent—
guileless, clumsy perhaps,
but not a villain here.

No, the villains are elsewhere,
though in our midst, plotting
their own eclipse, hatched
in the stygian reaches
of malignant minds,
seeking to come between you
and yourself.

This is the plague
of darkness.

Already you have lost
your children, guarding them
in the wrong places, ignoring
the danger in their safest spaces.

If once, just once, you
dropped all pretense and shed
your certainties, the truth
would embrace you
like a father welcoming home
his late-returning prodigal son.

You can no longer afford
your ignorance.
And what you see not,
you must infer, as astronomers,
through tracing bending orbits,
infer the presence of unseen planets.

What part of history
is dispensable? What
would you erase?
The hard-won knowledge
of good and evil—
our lodestar
since the fatal bite of Eden?

Listen:
the sun of truth gives the only light
that will never blind you.
Stare into it.

©2024. Cherie Zaslawsky. All rights reserved.

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