I already had my miracle.
I didn't need another, Lord.
As much as primeval terror must have gripped
my ancestors' poor hearts and stopped them
for the time it took for the Moon mask to finally slip
and the light to return, profound joy fills mine.
I understand what they did not
and perhaps understanding eliminates fear,
but inspires joy? I needed no further proof,
and yet I'm blessed with this tide of joy
that swells within me as the sunlight slowly ebbs.
My defeat was already complete.
I had already surrendered.
This superfluous, bonus joy was more than I needed.
What do I do with it? Is this where chisel meets stone
to celebrate the heavens with monuments and temples?
Is this when tombs open and summon the breath they need
to whisper to us that death is a lie?
Is this where we find everything we need,
after we already have all we thought we need
everything except that one thing
that makes us more than we are?
But what have we done with the world
on which this shadow is cast
as the eclipse finally achieves totality
and we drop our tinted welders' glass
to witness the impossible with the naked eye?
What have we done to this world
burning in the shadow of the Moon?
Our own efforts to conjure an eclipse are puny.
We obscure the sky with wildfire smoke,
upon this our Earth turned Icarus
buried under microplastic snow.
When the end comes it will be slow,
not with the double flash of a false sun,
not announced by a thermonuclear thunderclap,
but creep in with potholes and hosepipe bans,
abandoned roadworks and traffic jams,
frustration and frayed nerves
and failed harvests and frugality
as rising prices gouge what few coins remain
from the pockets of the poor
to pay for stockpiles in the bunkers of the rich,
to furnish them and make them more commodious
for the reckoning to come,
when all engines of commerce finally break down
in the fractured world we manufactured with them
and the lies with which we grease them run out
and industry ceases and falls silent
and the climate eclipse we have caused
delivers our extinction.
We never stopped being cannibals, you know.
Our hunger today is simply more elaborate,
our craving more refined, our appetite more elevated.
We garnish different meat. We perform an alchemy
that turns the red blood on our hands
into whatever colour we desire, whatever we require
to dye our deeds as virtuous or necessary or inevitable,
cycles of accusation making us all a lynch mob
in pursuit of each other down a spiral of blame,
but once we deplete all other forms of sustenance
we will revert back to what we always secretly were
and devour each other once again
as we become the midday werewolves of a black Moon.
We rationalise the irrational,
act like we understand what cannot be understood,
describe it in inadequate words,
borrowed words taught to conquered peoples,
our own people, long ago,
forced to forget their language
after concatenations of conquest unknown to history
redacted their tongue under the weight of its own eclipse,
words that serve only to persuade us
to accept a loss we can no longer remember
or even imagine.
Better to believe the person to whom truth is delivered
than to try to understand it and render it into these words.
Better to believe the poet in the first flush of inspiration
stumbling from the cave still giddy with trance and ecstasy.
Poetry infiltrated myth.
We smuggled it into the stories we used
to help us recite the lineage of kings
and remind us who we must allow to rule us.
We wove a secret poem through the words
unwittingly uttered by all the professional liars
to whom we surrender our language,
and the poem tells us of: a cave,
infinitely dark, where monsters dwell;
the undisturbed depths of the abyss
before the Creator breathed upon the face of the waters;
a trackless wilderness extending beyond the horizon
where we assume animal form to visit ourselves
to talk of annihilation and transformation
under a sky we could once touch, reaching up
and planting stars in the firmament with our fingertips;
an ancient eclipse witnessed in the first dawn;
a place where we have been lost utterly
from which we have nevertheless emerged.
The eclipse reminds us of the greatest gift
the wasteland grants the exile,
the knowledge that we are nothing,
a knowledge each tribe may try to distort
into something it can claim as its own,
but this knowledge belongs to no-one and everyone,
and as we gather at this mass grave, this history we share,
to indulge in a jubilant joint deletion of identity
upon the grand occasion of a celestial event,
amid the cheers and loud applause and celebration
of the swarming crowds as the sun becomes its opposite,
a ring of diffuse light shimmering
around the deepest darkness in the universe,
listen. Discern, if you can, the barely audible whisper
that tells you death is a lie,
that tells you to become more than you are,
and less, that tells you once the Moon mask slips
it is only by embracing your insignificance
that you shall inherit the Earth.
