Dawn to Dusk to Dawn

1918, Idaho

Eternity, punctuated, when

Cirdadian expectations fail

Lacing horizons with copper hues

In rusty, circumferential manifest

Penumbrae waxing in precarious

Syzygy toward totality

Enabling such pageantry

.

1970 Georgia

Evening creatures take flight

Cicadas, then, sorties of birds

Lulled into the false dusk

In anachronistic lotteries of survival

Pitting consumption against consuming

Struggling katydids and crickets aspire to compete

Embracing the ruse

.

1994, Arizona

Each creature knows, but not why

Confused but directed

Light's fade engages

Instruction sets, ancient

Primevally programmed

Spring Peepers and wood frogs join the chorus

Ears of owls, pivot to hone in

.

2017, Tennessee

Excitement invokes reverent whispers

Cooing, but from the human creatures instead

Losing carats, as the sky's jewel,

Is a diamond on its ring, only beads peaking through

Promiscuous forays into obsidian

Shadow bands' coalescence serves the day, night

Ethereally

.

2024, Vermont

Evocations of antidiluvian fears

Creaming to the top of limbic memories

Lost when science, long ago, methodically

Intercepted superstition from religious codependence

Purging us from the terror of the false dawn

Sol anthropomorphically winking at us

Enlightened from the darkness, we now wink back

***

____________________

Author's Note: this poem, entered into the "In Eclipse" Challenge, has a companion prose piece submitted for Monday, Solar Eclipse Day, April 8, as Day #99 of Story-a-Day Challenge: "The Second Coming."

Title photo was an iPhone panorama I shot during totality in Gallatin City Cemetery in Gallatin, Tennessee, August 21, 2017.