(A poem written in Glasgow during the solar eclipse of 20th
March 2015)
We ran together,
you and I,
as wolves and
werewolves through the
thickening dusk,
racing for two
and a half delirious minutes,
twisting through vanishing
twilit forests of hidden desire,
transformed to
reveal our secret selves,
drunk with
ecstasy and apocalypse,
drunk with the
darkness of the eclipse, rioting,
giddy, swooning with
the swift sudden reperfusion
of all the
glorious unspent rage of ages past,
restored by the wider world's paralysis,
set free, gone wild.
set free, gone wild.
The birds meekly
surrender their songs to silence.
The deranged Sun
rides the Moon along a course
plotted upon the surface of the Earth by helpless
astronomers .
A few brief
seconds are turned into an epoch, an age of wonder,
in which our
howls are tribute, not to some Moon of myth,
but one suddenly present
and full with night during the brightest day,
stealthily
stashing the Sun’s stolen light on its dark side.
Her lead disc
offers a single coin to reckon the whole world's worth:
Quoth the Moon, "why
should I return your Sun to you?
The world it
illuminates only excites your cupidity.
By its light your
suspicious spy satellites peer over shoulders,
reading communiques
or love letters from one hundred miles high.
Why should I readmit
you to their orbit,
let alone allow
you to trespass upon mine?
Your society is a
crime committed in broad daylight:
isn't the cover
of darkness more fitting for your conspiracies?"
Inexorable and
punctilious physical law
punctually peels away
the darkness She adores
from the highest mountain
peaks to shingle shores
and the returning
day is met, not with joy,
but by our own resignation
and indifference once more,
as we return to
our desks and our dull quotidian chores,
but we will run
again as wolves and werewolves,
across the
blazing caesium fields of Chernobyl
where we buried
alive the angry fires we made
for a while at
least,
across the
glittering bismuth marsh of Pripyat,
drooling with the
bitter potash filling our mouths and nostrils
leached from the
ashes of this burned and bleached land
as all the world’s
gold melts and sublimates to nothing
under an
inevitable hot thermonuclear glare
and houses with
walls made of feathers take flight,
startled by the
bomb’s loud blast,
and the fireball
brings the eclipse home to stay at last,
pulling the Sun
out of the Earth,
its cloudy fist first
clenched around it,
obscuring it like
the Moon had done,
before opening
its hand to blow the ashes from its palm,
releasing us to
roam and bay forever at the Moon,
in the parched grey
twilight woods of nuclear winter.
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